Community reviews for Qlovi

I like the structure provided by the Qlovi lesson plan template -- it even allows teachers to put an idea of the lesson's pacing into the plan. I like how the lesson can be (easily) linked to Common Core State Standards. Each stage in the lesson can also be connected to a standard. It's really easy to add the standards to the lesson, too. I really like the way the students' mastery can be tracked and used to provide more feedback to the students and to help the teacher identify students who need more attention and where that attention should be directed. I would like to see more variety in the readings available on the site. I'd also like to see a bit more on the upper end of the spectrum, but I'm a high school teacher and the site is more directed toward the middle grades.

I thought that this was a worthwhile product to try, especially if your class is all reading the same book or novel. Qlovi is limited in free books, and is building their “paid” library. For instance, doing a search for reading materials between 400 and 1600 Lexile levels, the program pulled 46 free books, and many of them were on the higher side. For students who struggle with reading harder texts, this might not be a great independent tool. Teachers are given 50 tokens to pay for book usage (it costs 1 token per book shared with students, so for a class of 24, you would be paying 24 tokens). Books also expire from your account after several weeks. I would also be interested to see how the nonfiction library grows in the coming months. Currently, there are limited titles with a rather small span of interest.

I really enjoyed using Qlovi and would suggest it to teachers who want to include an eReader and writing program in their classroom. I loved the ability to differentiate my lessons for individual learners and enjoyed how I could view how long students worked on their reading. It was also beneficial to see what annotations they made as they read. Lastly, ready-made lessons that are already aligned to Common Core Standards are at one’s fingertips and can easily be added to your digital classroom as an assignment. A few things that need improvement are that Qlovi allows you to purchase books with tokens (you are given 2 at the start of your sign-up). You may use the ones they have for free, but these are mainly books that are non-fiction. The lack of fiction, particularly young adult fiction was a major drawback for me as an English teacher. Also, there need to be more search options to look for books, as you simply must scroll through pages upon pages of books in order to find one you’d like to teach with.

Each lesson you create has multiple parts to ensure that you are using a variety of teaching strategies to teach the topic. Options of elements you could include in the lesson were warm up, reading, quiz, essay, and exit ticket. The Warm Up and Exit Ticket were in the style of a traditional quiz question: multiple choice, short answer, fill in the blank, or true/false. You include a learning objective with the title of the lesson. There was a place for a standard, but it was not a field you could edit yourself. There did not appear to be a way to differentiate the lessons for specific groups of students. Creating an account on the website is easy, the time consuming part would be creating the lessons. There is a simple help menu available for teachers trying to navigate the website. However, the editing is not practical, so I’m not sure how much it could be customized. I wanted to include checks of understanding or side notes in the context of the book, but the only thing I could figure out how to add was a Frayer Model. I needed a resource that would allow more student interaction with the text through pictures, maps, questions, definitions, and additional web links.