Products
Product: BigUniverse.com
1/4/2011 By:
Retail price: Classroom one-year subscription, $99.95 (up to 35 students);
classroom recurring subscription, $14.95 a month; school site license, $995
By MaryAnn Karre
BigUniverse is a dynamic online
reading, writing, and sharing
community that has more than
2,600 excellent fiction and nonfiction
books for young readers.
Quality and Effectiveness:
BigUniverse is a learning community
that provides a wide
variety of attractive books from
leading publishers, the tools to
create new books easily, and
many ways for its members to connect with
others to share messages and books. The library
of publishers’ books is impressive; it contains
many excellent nonfiction titles, and they display
beautifully, looking very much like the original
books. Even the sound and “feel” of turning
pages is similar to that experienced with a printed
book. Although it is a broad community of
readers and writers in more than 150 countries,
contributions and messages are monitored and
limited to ensure a safe experience for young
members.
Ease of Use: BigUniverse’s bright colors and
prominent tabs for reading, writing, and sharing make it easy
and fun to navigate. Students love to create a personal page
with backgrounds and an avatar chosen from the site’s collections.
Even young users can find books with the browse
and search features on the first page, or they can use the
navigation guides to locate books by grade, reading level, interest age, category, and/
or language. The books can
be read, saved to a bookshelf,
and shared with others.
Creating books is simple and
fun too, requiring very little
computer expertise.
Creative Use of Technology: By allowing members
to comment, recommend,
and read what others
think and to share their original
books with the world,
BigUniverse has created a
safe, fun, and educational
social network.
Suitability for Use
in a School Environment:
BigUniverse is a
simple way to add thousands
of books, which
can be shared by any
number of students at
the same time, for a fraction
of what the print
copies would cost, with
no wear and tear on the collection, and without filling up
valuable classroom and library space. Teachers can assign
books to students and assess comprehension with fun quizzes,
get scores instantly, and view assessment reports. The
books display beautifully on interactive whiteboards, so it’s
easy to share with large groups, and the writing aspect is
easily adapted to reports, reading responses, and writing
workshops; or custom books can be created to support the
curriculum. BigUniverse also uses reading levels (Fountas &
Pinnell, DRA ), so students can choose books at their reading
levels, and educators can use them to differentiate instruction.
Top Features
¦ Readers can locate books by grade,
reading level, interest age, category,
and language.
¦ BigUniverse is a simple way to integrate
and teach technology in the elementary
classroom.
¦ The product improves home-school
communication, allowing teachers and
parents to become involved in students’
reading and writing.
Overall Rating
BigUniverse has an impressively large collection of
e-books for the elementary reader, most gratifyingly
its nonfiction and foreign-language books. But it is
the whole reading-writing-sharing package that sets it
above all other e-book products.