Classroom.booksource.com Classroom Id
Zareen Zapata
Various reports provide data on student reading habits. For example, popularity reports help you see which books get your students excited about reading and which books can be removed from your classroom library.
Booksource Classroom is a free online tool for classroom teachers and school and district administrators. While each group will use Booksource Classroom differently, there are no paid features and no hidden upgrades.
Booksource is a leading provider of classroom libraries and educational materials for school districts, classroom teachers, and literacy coaches. We've helped build classroom libraries for more than 3,000 school districts across the United States and are a strategically sourced vendor for the New York City Department of Education and the City of Chicago Board of Education.
I came upon the Booksource Classroom site on a Saturday afternoon while doing my own little brainstorm session on how to bring back my classroom library. I wanted to not only get the students excited about reading, but also provide them with some additional and different books than that are provided in our library. Having such a packed schedule, it is difficult to get those independent reading times in.
With any classroom library, there is the issue of lost and/or damaged books. In the past, I would write down all the books in the classroom library and try to take inventory of them at the end of the year. Through some research, I found the Booksource Classroom site. Being able to electronically input the books was the first plus side. The second, and possibly the best, was the fact that students checked out their own books and had the opportunity to rate their books and write a short review.
For the short time that I have been using this in the classroom, the students have not lost interest. They are checking out books and wanting to read more! Watching students pull out a book that they had the pride and enjoyment of checking out themselves on one of the classroom computers, warms my heart. In the morning, during recess, and at the end of the day, I can look to the back of the room and see the students at the book cart and/or the computers checking out, returning, and rating books. I foresee that this momentum will continue as the year goes on.
I am a Western Kentucky University and Campbellsville University graduate. I have been a teacher in Hardin County since 2012. I know that all students can be successful and strive for each of my students to do so.
I believe that success is not measured in 100% (grades) but also in character and growth. I am a daughter, a sister, and an aunt. My father was in the military and because of this I am an Army Brat and have had the pleasure of living in different places and encountering different people.
By the end of the year, I had lost a few books, which was a little disheartening, but fine, really. But more importantly, I knew deep down that my classroom library was not user-friendly, for me or my students. I needed a system. After hearing about Booksource Classroom for years, I decided to give it a try.
Students can check out and return books all on their own, but I suppose you could manage it all for them if you wanted to for some reason. Personally, I think having the students in charge of the process is what makes a library management system like this so appealing. With students checking out and returning books online, all I have to do is monitor and reshelve (and I can always get help with these tasks, too).
I'm a current middle school reading teacher and former high scchool English teacher who is dedicated to engaging and empowering my students. I love to design authentic learning experiences that creatively trick students into learning.
How inclusive is your classroom library? Can all of your students find themselves represented in your books? Do you have books to introduce students to characters who are different from themselves? And how do you even evaluate the diversity of your classroom library? Classroom Booksource has an amazing tool to help build a more diverse classroom library!
You may already be familiar with the work by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop on having books as mirrors, windows, and sliding doors for students. These important concepts can help guide our decisions about the books we share with our students and include in our classroom libraries.
Books can be a mirror because they allow you to see yourself in the story or in the characters. Through mirror books students see a reflection of their own lives and experiences. These stories can help you feel like there are other people just like you.
Books can be a window because they allow you to see into the lives of others who are different from you. Window books help you learn about different people, cultures, and places. Through these books we can see other worlds and how they are similar or different from our own lives. Students can build acceptance, understanding, and empathy for others through these stories.
Books can be a sliding door that allows the readers to enter the worlds that are different from their own. By walking through the door with their imaginations, readers can experiences these new realities created or recreated by the author.
Classroom Booksource is an incredible FREE online tool to help teachers organize their classroom library. You can enter all of your book titles to keep track of what you have as well as set up a check-out system for students.
Once you have entered your books into the system, you will receive a wealth of information about your classroom library. It provides an analysis of your books to tell you the ratio of fiction to nonfiction books and the percentage of books at each reading level. This information helps you decide which books to add to create a well-balanced library.
In full transparency, the Diversity Audit is a phenomenal tool but it can be very time-consuming to enter all of your books into the system. Classroom Booksource provides an alternative way to evaluate the diversity of your classroom library without having to enter all of your books into their system. You can instead use their Inclusive Classroom Library Checklist.
Over the past 15 years, I have labeled my books with Accelerated Reader levels, relabeled them when they changed some of the levels, and then relabeled them when we switched to Scholastic Reading Counts. It gets a little confusing for the students, because there are sometimes three labels on the books, and they are not in any specific spot. So, I decided to put the stickers on the spines of the books, and add a piece of clear packing tape to make sure they stick. I also put the lexile and reading levels on the inside front flap, along with the number of points. Now, I just have to explain to the students where to look for the label and information, and it will be uniform on all of the books.
Most of the time, I will just have the chapter books out for the students to choose from, and I will keep the rest of the books in a different area in the room or back in the closet. Students will still have access to the school library, so they will have plenty of other books to choose from there.
In my new classroom library area, I have the books in tubs that are labeled with colored circles. Students will be able to easily identify where to put the books when they are finished with them. Even though some of the old labels are still on the books, they will know to look for the sticker on the spine and the information on the inside flap. I also have additional books that I will rotate in when they get bored with the ones that are out.
A Slob Comes Clean is the completely honest (and never-ending) story of my deslobification process. As I find ways to keep my home under control, I share the truth about cleaning and organization methods that actually work for a real-life slob. And I'm funny.
During my first year of teaching fourth grade English Language Arts, I had over 600 books in my classroom library, which contained copies of a complete popular series. (Side note: Here are 5 tips for getting books for your classroom library without breaking the bank!)
After that first year, I experienced what a lot of teachers face, the dreaded case of missing books. This was due to the fact that there were no clear expectations or proper checkout systems in place. Over the course of the summer, I replaced the books that were missing and created a basic checkout system.
I had student librarians handle filling out the information, but I noticed that they were falling down on the job. I took back control of the library checkout by filling in the information at the beginning of daily independent reading time.
Each table group had a specific day for classroom library checkout and the system was working well, but I wanted to improve the system, make it electronic, and give students more control of the classroom library.
I was searching for classroom library checkout systems for elementary levels on the Internet and found many suggestions of systems that worked. I knew I wanted a system that was electronic for organization and checking out and one that had the capabilities of logging-in each student with their own password.
Once I had the scanner in my possession, it was happily clicking through my vast library of books. Once the book is uploaded to the database you can add information about the reading level, basket locations, cover photos, etc.
The scanning was going great until I came across a book without a barcode. Remember, I wanted my classroom library checkout time to be less time consuming for the teacher and my students, so I wanted all of my books to have a barcode on them to make it easier for my students to checkout the books.
If you are like me, your library consists of a lot of Scholastic books, which for the most part do not have a barcode, just the ISBN number listed. Most of the time the ISBN numbers would not be the full ISBN-13 number, so I would have to look it up on websites such as Amazon or ISBN Search.
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