So you’re thinking about assigning your class a book report. You can hear the groans already, can’t you?

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I have always hated book reports, even though I’m a lifelong voracious reader, writing major and English teacher. They’re staid and dull for the student and unreliable forms of assessment for the teacher. With online book summaries (think “Cliff’s Notes”) ripe for copying and/or rephrasing, book reports aren’t effective measures of understanding — and don’t even tell us if a student has read the book.

So what assignments do make good indicators of student reading and comprehension? First of all, they are ones that can’t be plagiarized. Think of ways your students can express their unique experiences of reading a text. When you require students to make something original and personal, copying becomes moot.

Students can write diaries written in character, newspaper articles about plot lines, a book review or a dialectical journal that records a dialogue between the ideas of the text and the ideas of the reader.

Integrating technology opens up yet more options, though you may have to schedule a “lab day” in class to accommodate students who do not have access to tech at home. The ideas I discuss below work well for both independent reading as well as literature circles. With any of these assignments, it’s important to ensure that the student stay true to the text being studied and accurately reflect its plot, characters and setting.

The main goal of traditional book reports is to summarize plot, describe characters and detail main events. Students can accomplish all these criteria by retelling a story in different mediums, such as Comic Life software, which, as it sounds, creates comic strips, or a fun app for the iPad called Puppet Pals, which lets students animate settings and give voice to characters.

Or, students can create their own movie trailers and movie posters, re-imagining a text as film. The newest version of iMovie has a trailer wizard that follows Hollywood templates and is easy to use. To accompany the trailers, students can use Big Huge Labs to make movie posters that are preformatted to look professional and can be printed and displayed in the classroom.

Podcast or video interviews can be conducted among characters in a text. One student can play many roles or small groups reading the same text can work together. My favorite version is a talk-show format where characters are asked their “behind-the-scenes” reactions to story events. It requires students to be aware of both plot and character development while providing an opportunity for both creativity and fun.

Songify is a popular app that creates songs from speech. Students can describe an aspect of a story or a character’s feelings in their own words, or they can read quotes from a text and convert them into song. Actual singing talent is not required.

Using Twitter, students can broadcast mini book reviews, which can be followed by the general public with the hashtag #bookreviews. While individual tweets must conform to Twitter’s 140-character limit, students can post several tweets in a row to bolster the assignment.

Fakebook allows students to make replicas of Facebook pages for characters in a text. There’s enough space for students to effectively display their understanding of characters, such as profile information, friends and posts — just like a real Facebook page.

These are just some of the possibilities for deeper learning and greater student engagement when we move away from the book report.