Classroom Library Organizer

Booksource Classroom is a free website program that works in conjunction with an app to help you develop an inventory and digital check-out system for your classroom library books. When teachers buy books at the book fair, bring their own books at home, find them at yard sales, or have them donated it can lead to a large collection, and sometimes it is not always clear what one has in their collection. It would be a very time-consuming process to create a list of all of the books in one classroom, and it would be even more time-consuming if one wanted to look up the reading levels of said books. So as one can guess, such things rarely happen, as they are just not practical.

What I love about the BookSource tool is that you create your account online, and set up your classroom the way you like. For example, you can set up ‘locations’, which could be things like different genres, or series bins. What makes this work well in terms of mobility is the corresponding app. Once the online account is set up, one can download the app, log in, and begin scanning the books. The app uses the camera and mobility of cell phones to scan the barcodes of books and automatically adds them classroom account. Since the app scans the barcode of the book, the program cross-references the book against the company database, and several other sources, and adds additional information like a synopsis, interest level, reading level (for several systems), genre, page count, word count, series if applicable, title, author, and book cover. Information that could potentially take up to twenty minutes to acquire is instantly generated in seconds. The mobility of the app also allows the books to be scanned, and ‘checked in’ and ‘out’ of the classroom library.