60 Second Recap has been circulating around the edu-blog-o-sphere for about a week so I decided that I had to check it out. 60 Second Recap provides book summaries in sixty second video segments. There is a sixty second summary of each chapter of each book. Along with the chapter summaries there is a general overview of each book.

60 Second Recap offers registered users the option to record a video response to each video summary. The service is new, but the concept has the potential to be a good way for users to extend the summaries found on 60 Second Recap. If you don’t have access to a web cam, you can record a simple text response.

Applications for Education
60 Second Recap is a very new service still in its alpha phase of development with only a couple of dozen book titles in its library. That said, the concept of 60 Second Recap is a good one that could prove very useful for middle school and high school literature students.

The concept of 60 Second Recap could be the basis for a student project in which they create their own video recaps of the books they read. If you don’t have access to video cameras, your students could use a service like Animoto or Stupeflix to create their video recaps of the books they’ve read.

Here are some related resources that may be of interest to you:
Guys Read – Getting Boys to Read
AdLit – Strategies for Teaching Adolescent Literature
Shmoop – Study Guides for History and Literature