LIS 568 Review - Biblionasium

Hello all!

This week I explored a website called Biblionasium, which is like Goodreads for kids, designed to get students excited about reading. It’s a safe, digital reading community created with the intention that students can:

📚 Track their reading – Log books they’ve read, are reading, or want to read.
⭐ Write reviews and rate books – Helps build critical thinking and writing skills.
🎯 Get reading recommendations – Based on their age, interests, and reading level.
🏆 Join reading challenges – Teachers and librarians can create reading goals or competitions.
👩‍🏫 Connect with classmates – Students can share book suggestions with friends and teachers.

Ultimately, the goal is to make reading more social and interactive, and possibly could motivate reluctant readers.  Also, as someone who loves to read, I would've LOVED to have had this to I could keep track of all the books I read -- I can see young bookworms really loving this site, too.

It was easy to create an educator account, and as an educator, I am able to create a "reading group" for my class.  This is what the setup looks like: 

Then, you can easily add other educators or students (via parent email) to join the group: 

Then, we are free to add required readings, recommendations, or wishlists for parents to donate books. We can also create reading challenges for our group. The site also provides book suggestions itself. 

Biblionasium is so easy to navigate and I would definitely love to incorporate it into my own school library.  It could be introduced to teachers to use in their own classrooms for English units, or even just in the library itself through reader challenges that can make connecting with others through books more accessible -- almost as an easier to organize, more tech savvy book club. 

The biggest downside is that you can only have one group (of up to 30 students) for free, and to create more groups, a paid school subscription is required. The school-wide version is a newer development and they list the following benefits: 

• Unlimited student and educator accounts
• Ability to create unlimited groups and use multiple groups within and across different grades 
• Expand reading challenges across grade levels or to the entire school
• Ability for your students’ accounts, their reading challenges, bookshelves, book reviews, book recommendations, and awards to move with them from class to class and year to year
• Students will be able to track their reading journey over the years
• Ability to include multiple educators to collaborate and oversee each group 
• Include your school librarian to help bridge the connection between classroom to library
• Progress data and detailed reporting across grades and for entire school 
• Invite and connect parents for better student reading outcomes 
• Most importantly – a school subscription can be supported by school or district funds, versus a teacher/librarian's personal budget

The cost of this is not publicly available and schools are instructed to email them at contact@biblionasium.com to upgrade.

Ultimately, I think this site has a lot of potential on a large scale for connecting readers through a school, or even on the small, more affordable side of using it for enhancing individual classroom excitement for reading.

References: 

Biblionasium. (2022, August 14). How to implement a school-wide independent reading program with Biblionasium.Biblionasium Blog. https://blog.biblionasium.com/2022/08/14/schoolwide/

Biblionasium. (n.d.). The reading social network for kids. https://www.biblionasium.com

Warmly, 

Ahnalese