While toting around a copy of 1984 and analyzing The Great Gatsby are time-honored high school traditions, Rocketbook’s study guides for these classics are definitely an update from the ones available when I was in high school. Rocketbook’s study guides take full advantage of all the web makes possible. Are you a visual learner? Check out the video study guides that include graphics, text, and narration. Auditory more your style? You can download free (for now, anyway) mp3 versions of study guides ranging from Animal Farm to Jane Eyre. There are wikis for the books that include character descriptions and quizzes in addition to thorough summaries of the material. Rocketbook claims these are written by college professors and grad students, which might be true in the beginning. However, since the pages are wikis I’m not sure how they’ll maintain that in the future. There appear to be .pdf versions of the study guides as well, though I didn’t have much luck getting them to open.
Rocketbook is still in beta so glitches with technology and some unanswered questions don’t seem like deal-breakers to me. There is some advertising, but nothing unusual for a freely available web service and nothing that was distracting enough that it seemed to take away from the task at hand. This seems like a great supplement to assigned reading and a nice way to make some classic literature more accessible to people with different learning styles.
Apparently back in the day there was also an eBook reader called RocketBook; if there’s any connection between the two I couldn’t find it.
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Kate -
Thanks for your post on our company! I am excited to see that you enjoyed our videos which we are happy to say have been embraced enthusiastically by teachers, students and other librarians as well! Of course I’m concerned that the PDF files weren’t opening well for you and would love to hear the issues you ran into in your quest to do so.
Yes, the guides are written by professors and grad students and we’re hoping that the wiki can provide more viewpoints and further enlightenment to the works of classic literature that we have covered. The PDF’s will always provide the “original Rocketbook” for those who prefer a specific view by an author. We subscribe to a “wisdom of crowds” mindset here and relish the fact that users now have a platform to express intelligent views on these works.
Please revisit our site soon as we are relaunching MyRocketbook.com to encompass more of a social collaborative presence. I hope to see you within the Rocketbook Community!
Thanks for your thoughts and comments. Please feel free to contact me at any time to express any additional feedback so we can continue to make Rocketbook better!
- Rick
Hi Rick–thanks for the additional info. I’ll try out the .pdfs again and pass along details if I still can’t get them to open, and I look forward to checking out your relaunch.