Both on-line and face-to-face courses rely on textbooks as an important source of information for students. A challenge for instructors in an on-line setting is to insure that students are learning from their textbooks. One way to address this challenge is to use productivity software tools to develop assignments that promote student thinking and interaction with course content. This paper gives examples and directions of activities that are easy to design and relatively easy to grade, but require thought on the part of the students to complete. The assignments are based on graphic organizers discussed in K-12 reading methods textbooks such as those by Gunning (2004) and Vacca & Vacca (2005). Graphic organizers are typically designed for students to complete using paper and pencil. With slight modifications, higher education faculty can design challenging assignments based on graphic organizers that can be distributed to students and completed by students electronically. [For complete proceedings, see ED490133.]