“If you think about math teachers, they’ve always been able to give assignments in which students are required to show their work. That makes it easy for them to check individual understanding, pretty much on a daily basis. English and humanities teachers who give extended reading assignments have never had that luxury. Instead, they’ve comparatively been flying blind, taking it on faith that most students have done the required reading, without knowing for sure, and moving along daily without solid evidence that kids are really ‘getting it.’”

That’s what Jason Singer, the CEO and founder of Gobstopper, told me was the central issue his product is designed to address: the challenge of ensuring that every student is meaningfully moving forward in a given reading assignment—and not just faking it. Gobstopper is an ereading application that also promotes ongoing feedback between teachers and kids. How does it do that? By giving teachers the ability to embed customized, Common-Core-based, formative assessments right into the etexts that they assign to their kids. Teachers can also insert scaffolded support in the form of annotations, Web links, or links to video-sharing sites. (Imagine the power a teacher would have if she posted videos that explained her own reactions to and interpretations of portions of a text.) Teachers can also add polls and quizzes, turning those assigned texts into ongoing class conversations and providing students, through Gobstopper’s reporting tools, with both qualitative feedback and quantitative snapshots about individual and group progress and comprehension.

Just by glancing at their Gobstopper dashboards, teachers can see what percentage of kids in a specific class did their homework, how much time they spent reading, and what percentage of questions in a given Common Core standard such as “determining author intent” or “understanding historical context” their students answered correctly. Not only does that option eliminate the immense amount of time a typical humanities teacher wastes in class just trying to get a basic feel for who has actually completed and understood their assigned reading, but it cuts down on manual grading and attendant paperwork as well. Teachers needn’t necessarily enhance the etexts they assign from scratch, either. Instead they can select from among what Gobstopper calls “curriculets,” adding layers of ready-made content and assessments based on the skills they want to cover, and then tweaking the items to taste. For more information or to sign up and try Gobstopper, visit the welcome page for SLJ readers.

Subtext, launched a year ago and currently available as a free iPad and Edmodo app, is another application that doubles as a collaborative reading platform that focuses on Common Core skills. Subtext’s ereader has all the features—including text-to-speech capability, full-text searching, font selection, and a built-in dictionary—that you’d expect from a modern ereader app. Plus, in the right-hand margins of assigned selections, you’ll find teacher and student comments, links, embedded YouTube videos, quizzes, and polls, all indicated by familiar Facebook-like avatars that transform the normally solitary act of assigned reading into a friendly, ongoing social exchange that encourages students to “talk to the text” and to talk to one another. At the end of each chapter of the novels I previewed, students were asked—in Facebook’s thumbs up/thumbs down fashion—to rate the section. They were also invited to add a comment or prediction, start or join a discussion thread, or blog about the chapter they’d just finished reading.

Subtext works with any native or converted EPUB document, integrates with Google Books and Feedbooks, and Web pages can also be imported. According to Heidi Perry, Subtext’s marketing VP, lots of instructors choose to share assigned texts—and all of the ongoing classroom sidebars—on their interactive whiteboards during class time, not exactly “flipping” the typical ELA classroom, but certainly turning it inside out in a way that exposes the collective metacognitive underpinnings of the reading experience. Teachers can set up classes in Subtext from scratch or students can log into Subtext using their existing school-provided Google or Edmodo accounts. Subtext is working on creating an Android app and Web reader for the 2013-2014 school year. To find out more or to download the free app, visit www.subtext.com.

Both Gobstopper and Subtext are currently free at their most basic levels and when used with public domain texts. Neither has set a pricing plan for premium service levels that they’ll be offering in the future. Both companies, though, plan to monetize, in part by sharing profits on ebook sales. Subtext already partners with Google Books to offer convenient in-app ebook purchases that can be seamlessly delivered to entire classes, and Gobstopper is looking to have publishers on board by next fall.

Subtext and Gobstopper excite the English teacher and school librarian in me, opening up lots of new possibilities for collaboration and curation. And both applications completely blow the tired old book report options out of the water and instead encourage reading, analysis, and writing on a formative, rather than a summative, basis.

Plus, I can totally imagine using either app to remotely administer a summer reading program… preferably as I relax on a private island somewhere in the tropics. Sound good?

What did people discuss during all this socializing? One topic: How reading, by nature a solitary occupation, can also be a social one. Educational technology consultant Linda W. Braun’s Saturday morning session, “Social Reading: Inside the Ebook Book Discussions,” examined the ways that talking about books creates connection among readers. And while sharing one’s enthusiasm on social reading site Goodreads is terrific, those exchanges happen outside the book.

Enter social reading within Ereaders. Typically, reading an Ebook allows for highlights, note-taking, and sharing on Twitter and Facebook from within the book. Braun showed her audience iPad apps that take social reading a few steps further. First, she introduced two book apps—Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox (a 3-D tour of the universe, which Braun sees as the future of nonfiction) and Cupcakes! (an app for creating virtual cupcakes; the future of cookbooks).

Braun then introduced two free reading apps—Inkling (allows for purchasing a chapter of a book at a time, the creation of reading groups, and private or public notes) and Kno (a textbook app that provides detailed sharing options perfect for study groups).

David Levithan speaks at the YALSA Lit Symposium in St. Louis. Photo by Emily Goodknight.

But the bulk of the discussion focused on the Subtext app. Subtext allows for the creation of groups, the easy purchase of one title for a group of readers, the side-loading of EPUB titles onto the app (including original student work, for example) and extensive sharing features. It is not only possible to highlight and add notes to the original text, the reader can also tag those notes, mark notes as spoilers, keep notes private, or turn off the notes feature altogether. Every attendee of the session left with a code granting access to a free copy of Steve Hamilton’s (Alex Award-winning) novel The Lock Artist (Minotaur Books, 2010) and the ability to join a reading group to begin November 10th.

This opens up myriad possibilities for both classroom and literature circles. Using Subtext, teachers and librarians can be right in the story with teen readers. Teachers are able to insert questions within the text and implement a setting that cloaks other student replies until the reader has posted themselves. An in-the-book discussion could level the playing field for students who are slow processors. They could read at their own pace at home, taking their time answering questions within the text, yet still feel part of the discussion.

There’s great potential for book club discussions as well. Book club members unable to attend their meetings could still participate in the discussion within the book. Other uses? Prepping for author visits, sharing creative writing projects, peer editing, sharing alternative endings–the list goes on. In sum, Subtext allows librarians to be part of the reading experience. It’s all about building relationships with teen patrons.

On Saturday afternoon, Rollie Welch, collections manager at the Cleveland Public Library, led the session “Classic Literature vs.21st Century Novels: Survival of the Fittest.” The purpose was to share ideas for persuading adults who work with teens to move beyond assigning or recommending classics that rarely appeal to teen readers.

Earlier this year, at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, Welch led a pre-conference session in which the attendees chose the one book that every teen should be assigned to read in 2057. In other words, what contemporary YA books will survive as a classic? (At that session, it came down to a tie between Laurie Anderson’s Speak (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999) and Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief (Picador, 2005)).

The YA Lit Symposium session really got rolling when Welch shared 15 theme areas. For each area, he began with a classic novel typically assigned in school, then offered a contemporary novel and a nonfiction title on the same theme. Audience members had a wonderful time recommending alternatives and applauding their favorites. For example, for the theme of “Young Soldiers at War,” rather than assigning The Red Badge of Courage, why not try Craig Crist-Evans’s Amaryllis (Candlewick, 2003) or Evan Wright’s Generation Kill (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004)? In the Mystery category, rather than The Hound of the Baskervilles, consider Rick Yancey’s The Monstrumologist (S&S, 2010), or Richard Jones’s Jack the Ripper: The Casebook (Andre Deutsch, 2009). Rather than Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender (Harper & Row, 1967), try Paul Volponi’s Black and White (Viking, 2005) or Brian Shields’s The WWE Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to World Wrestling Entertainment (DK, 2009).

Welch believes that at least three on his list of classics will still be read and enjoyed by today’s teens–The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Even so, he offered Printz Award winner, Ship Breaker (Little, Brown 2010) by Paolo Bacigalupi as an alternative to the latter in the category of “Hero’s Journey of Self Discovery.”

The YA Lit Symposium is held every other year. The 2014 conference will be held in Austin, TX, over the Halloween weekend.

Angela Carstensen is Head Librarian and an Upper School Librarian at Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York City. She also blogs at Adult Books 4 Teens. Angela served on the Alex Awards committee for four years, chairing the 2008 committee, and chaired the first YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adult committee in 2009. Recently, she edited Outstanding Books for the College Bound: Titles and Programs for a New Generation (ALA Editions, 2011). Contact her via Twitter @AngeReads.