Organizing My Books

Everyone on the blogs I have been reading are 'buzzing' about organizing the classroom. Well, I thought I would put my two cents in.

I decided this was the year I was going to get my classroom library organized. The best solution I found was a free web based and/or iPhone app called Classroom Organizer.
This app allowed me to scan my books' ISBN barcodes and it automatically scanned the book information into a database. Some of the books I had did not have ISBN barcodes or it would not read them for some reason, but that is ok because I could manually enter these as well a most other information it did not automatically put in.

After your initial login, there are separate areas, one for teachers and one for students. The area for teachers requires an additional password to get to so students are NOT able to accidentally wander into this section and change things up on you.


Did I mention it is free?

This is a view of the teacher area. Here you can set up & manage specific features for your library, add, delete or edit titles within your library, add, delete or edit students in your class, view checkout history for individual students, & select from student or library reports to understand the reading habits & book inventory in your library.

Did I mention it is free?

Once I was all done, I then went to the web based login, went into the teacher section and exported an excel file that had all my book information in it.



Did I mention it is free?

With this I used my handy dandy Dymo Label Maker and created labels for each book.






Did I mention it is free?

Now, each book is categorized and can be checked out and back in again with... yep, you guessed it... my Classroom Organizer on the computer. I also like that I can add information on each book like Location, AR Points, Interest & Lexile Level, Fiction/Non-Fiction, page & word counts, etc.

Did I mention it is free?

This is the student page. From here they can click on either Check Out or the Return buttons.






Did I mention it is free?

The Check Out button takes them to a page that allows them to look for their name and/or picture.






Did I mention it is free?

After they click on their names, they can opt to view Book List or to type in an ISBN (like they would know that) or keywords. Then they click finish and they have successfully checked out a book. To return it they just do the same process but click on Return instead of Check Out.

Did I mention it is free?


My only complaint would be that it does not allow to manually put in an image of the book. It either grabs one in the entry process or it just doesn't have one. I hope in the future it allows you to manually upload one.

When I go back to school next week I will take some pictures of my library and post them so you can see what it looks like. Hope you enjoyed and remember to stat 'Wild About School!'