Organize your Children's Books

I am not big on doing New Year’s Resolutions because I, like most people, start off strong and then fizzle out quickly.  However, this year I am trying to use technology to my advantage to help me with my arch nemesis: ORGANIZATION!!  In a previous post I described my new computer desktop organization, in this post I will tackle how to electronically organize all those wonderful children’s books you have AND give you a way to see all those books you have that you can use for math read alouds!  I previously have used the BooksApp2, but another teacher recently told me about Scholastic’s Book Wizard so I tested that one out as well.

BooksApp2

Pros: LOTS of features…the app creates lists by author, subjects (when you enter a book it automatically assigns subjects to the book,but you can add in additional subjects), series, and publishers. You can assign it to a collection; either Favorites, Have Read, Reading Now,  To Read, or you can add your own collection (maybe a Math Read Aloud collection???).  You can even keep track of who you loan books out to…however there is a con associated with that (read below).  I also like that if the info the app pulls up about the book does not include a picture, I can take a picture of the cover myself and upload it.

Cons: Contains ads and the “loan to a friend” option can only lend to people in your contacts list.  I wish I could just type in the name of the student, or fellow teacher, that I have loaned the book to.  Also, I can only scan books with my iPhone.  When I open the app on my iPad I can view all the books but I can’t scan new books.  And the reason I checked into Scholastic’s Book Wizard is that a teacher told me BooksApp2 wouldn’t scan the new Scholastic books.  I don’t have any new Scholastic books (it scanned all my old books just fine), but I did see in the app that it only recognizes ISBN-13 barcodes.  You can still add books that don’t have those, you just have to type in the title, author, or publisher and then select the book.

Scholastic’s Book Wizard

Pros: Very simple and easy to use.  The only feature it has is to create different book lists (again, my favorite list is a list of all your Math Read Alouds:). For SOME books it will give you all kinds of reading levels, including Grade Level Equivalent, Lexile Measure, Guided Reading Level, and DRA.

Cons: Does not have many features and the reading levels aren’t available for all books.  Just like the BooksApps2, I can’t scan the barcodes with my iPad, only the iPhone.  Some of my books gave me this error message when trying to scan “The book scanned is currently not in the database…” and they didn’t pull up even by typing in the title manually.  So I’m not sure where they pull their database from.

Personally, I am sticking with the BooksApp2.  This is mainly due to the fact that BooksApp2 was able to pull up every single one of my children’s books.  Some of them I had to manually have the app search because it wouldn’t scan the barcode.  However, both are free so test each one out for yourself and let me know what you think!  Or, do you use one that is even better than these two???