Original post by Jennifer L on September 10, 2019
Booksource is a free classroom library organization tool that can be accessed via web browser (screenshot below) or on your mobile (for both Android and Apple). In addition to creating an inventory of all your books, teachers can also create and manage student accounts, track who has which book, level books, and assess student development. Furthermore, students can independently check out and return books, and leave reviews. Even though this tool isn’t useful for everyone, it’s an excellent, quality resource that has answered a very specific problem that many teachers have (keeping track of the books in their classroom library)!
Teachers can easily use their mobile phone to set up their class library (screenshot below). The application allows teachers to use their phone to scan ISBN barcodes, and do most of the features that the web version allows. It isn’t a fancy application–quite bare bones, in my opinion, but it gets the job done efficiently.
Out of all the classroom library management applications I’ve tried out so far, Booksource is the best FREE one I’ve encountered because of how easy it is to use. There is a teacher-interface and a student-interface. It took me 20 minutes to teach my grade 6/7 students how to use it on the iPad and they’ve been independently using it since then.
While Booksource was officially rebranded and launched in 2013, their company history goes back to 1974. More information can be found here. In addition to classroom organization tools, Booksource also sells book collections and is affiliated with various programs in its community to promote literacy education.
Average: 4.7/5 Stars
This app certainly looks very interesting for classroom use. Currently I am doing the exact opposite of this (books are out and a free for all, students borrow them, keep them in their personal classroom libraries, take them home, hopefully bring them back..) as I want there to be as few barriers to reading as possible for my students. However, this definitely does result in a classroom library that shrinks a bit over the course of the school year. However, I can see how this may be useful for books that students are removing from the classroom in order to give them a bit of accountability in regards to using shared materials.