It amazes me just how many books I have accumulated in my short time teaching. I take pride in my books and all year I wondered just how many books I was losing. Whether a student accidentally took a book outside the classroom or home and how was I to know if it would ever be returned?
Classroom Booksource is a free website that allows you to scan all of your books into an online database. Students can check in/out books in your classroom just like they do in the school library.
There is an iPhone app that I STRONGLY recommend using to scan the books, since you just scan the barcode using their apps scanner. It saves time rather than typing it in from the computer.
Check out the features:
Once you sign up the page will look like this:
When you or your kids log in, they will have the two options. Obviously your kids will pick the Student Page.
When a student logs in, they will have the option to either check out or return their book.
Students search their name to get to their account.
Once students are in their account they enter the ISBN number or keyword. There is an option to search the book list, but sometimes the books don’t pop up. We had a talk about ISBN numbers, and for the most part, they were able to figure it out. I allowed my *librarian* be in charge of helping the students 😉
Here is an example: I typed Nancy Drew into the search bar and these came up. See the little button on the left? They just click that and voila!
Instead of having kids type in the ISBN you can buy the CueCat Scanner. It looks weird but its cheap and effective! It is $15 and compatible with MAC and PC. I haven’t invested in it yet, but wanted to let y’all know its out there 🙂
There is an option for having students rate the book over how well they liked it AND what condition the book was in when it was returned.
My favorite is that they leave a short summary of the book and it will e-mail it to you weekly! We use the somebody, wanted, but, so, and then method. It is an easy indicator if whether they understand summary! 🙂
You can also set customizable classroom rules. I allow five books because they have book boxes. I also allow them to keep the books longer than five days, they just have to check the book in and re check it out.
TEACHER PAGE
All of the books that you have scan into the database are able to be exported to an EXCEL file:
What I didn’t get to at the end of the year because I was moving districts, but will do the beginning of this year is have some helpful students highlight the books that are on this list. This way I can delete any books that went missing from the year before.
You can also generate reports over books in your library that are popular and never checked out. This has helped me in the decision process of weeding out older books….sort of 😉
Sorry for the long post, I’m a visual learner hence all the pictures.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hello Friends!
I am linking up with Teaching Trio to share my technology tidbit of the week!
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Becca Morris
June 19, 2014 at 8:45 pmI will be so happy if this website it up and working. I started using it two years ago and it went down.
✰Becca
Simply 2nd Resources
Amber Calderon
June 19, 2014 at 8:51 pmHello Becca!
It is up and working! I just used it this past year! 🙂 I can't believe it went down a while back! I hope that never happens again!
Thanks for stopping by!
Amber
Your Thrifty Co-Teacher
June 19, 2014 at 10:12 pmFantastic idea! I am DEFINITELY looking into this. Thank you for being so thorough and including pictures. I am a visual person as well. 😉
Amber Calderon
June 23, 2014 at 5:50 amThanks so much for the kind words!
Amber
Alison Rose
June 19, 2014 at 11:01 pmI have heard of this site over and over, but I've never seen a tutorial like this. Thank you! I will definitely be checking this out again because many of my books have started disappearing…which is fine if the kids are reading them, but I'd love to know who they ran off with.
Alison
Rockin' and Lovin' Learnin'
Sarah Kieffer
June 10, 2015 at 1:17 amThank you so much for this! We have 3,000 books to catalog this summer. Looking forward to using this website!
Amber Calderon
June 14, 2015 at 11:50 pmHello Sarah!!
Good luck organizing! I hope CB stays FREE FOREVER! ha! 😉
Amber
Becky W
July 9, 2015 at 12:51 pmI have had this program for years, but never have really take the time to make it work in my room. I will do that this year for sure after reading this! Thank you! Did you train ALL your students to be the "librarian" or just a few?
Blessings,
Becky
CookingUpSuccess
Fancy Free in 4th
August 10, 2015 at 4:43 pmI really need to get that app- I got the book retriever app last year and it was a total bust…
Thanks for sharing!
Fancy Free in Fourth
Kelly Vielmo
December 4, 2015 at 4:45 amI loved your posting and I'm starting to use Booksource today. I'm a parent and my kid's teacher has enlisted my help in getting her organized. I think it looks like a great product. Question for you: if a student came back and said they lost a book, how did you mark the book "lost" in your database? Is there a way to do that? Additionally, this is for my Kindergartener's class so the take-home books are all the 10-page mini-books and the teacher says that often the kids lose them. We're going to institute a $1/book donation from parents to replace the books, but any idea how to track that? Thanks!
Brenda
June 9, 2016 at 8:13 pmI love you app for my literacy library. My district uses DRA/Reading Recovery levels. It would be very helpful it that was a choice on you levels.
Thank you for the work you do to help teachers.
Heather
September 8, 2016 at 5:58 pmI was wondering can more that one teacher use this with the same list of books? Thank you!