Reading in community can make reading productively much easier. Reading groups, book clubs, and sharing book recommendations are all great ways to motivate readers and non-readers alike to continue in improving their reading skills. All of these things are possible in a regular classroom, but there is always technology that can help with goals like these. Biblionasium is one such piece of tech. Biblionasium is sort of like Goodreads only in that it focuses on reading and reading recommendations. Otherwise, there are so many more features that allow teachers to customize their classes’ reading experience.
The point of the website is to facilitate online discussion of books that are being read in class as well as books that are being read for fun. Kids can recommend books to their peers (as long as this feature is turned on by the teacher or librarian), they can comment on recommendations (this also needs to be authorized), and they can update their reading status. The website also allows teachers to create groups of up to 300 kids, with the assumption being that each of these groups will represent a specific group of kids. This could be a class of students, perhaps 25 kids total, or it could be an entire grade of students who all have to read the same books or are going through the same curriculum. The social nature of this tool creates a natural motivator for students–they want to keep up with their classmates and with the conversations happening. Teachers can also have multiple groups, which makes it possible to set up groups for each class a teacher has. If you are responsible for facilitating ten book groups during a semester, you can create and monitor groups for each of those groups. It wouldn’t be an easy task, but it would be much easier to track how students are grasping books and what they are and are not interested in. It would also be easy to see who is not doing their reading and who is, and who does and does not want to participate in online conversations.
There is no cost associated with the service, and there aren’t really any downsides. This is a great online book group and book sharing service that could work really well for a lot of different librarians, teachers, and students. You can set up reading challenges for students, show parents progress and contact them when necessary, and run reports to see how individual students are doing over time. There’s no app, as far as I can see, but it is a great online interface, so an app isn’t strictly necessary. I would recommend this website to anyone who needs something that can help motivate students to be invested in their school reading.
Library Studies 