21st Century Library

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As a grade 5 teacher, I am reminded everyday of the importance of reading and developing comprehension skills.  Whether working in Science, Social Studies, solving Math word problems, or Language Arts, a weak reader has an obvious disadvantage.  A lot of money has been spent on resources, and specific classroom lessons are taught to teach comprehension skills, but I have discovered an essential element to becoming a strong reader is through reading.  A student needs books or reading materials which are engaging and appropriate for the student's reading level.  Although I have always loved to read, it became a challenge for me as a new teacher to understand how to get all of my students to love reading also.  This was primarily due to an understanding of children's literature that basically consisted of Harry Potter.  I made a challenge for myself during my second year of teaching to read and obtain as many children's books as possible so that I am never stuck when a student asks "what should I read."

I have always enjoyed the social aspect of reading such as talking about books, suggesting books to friends, and learning about new books.  I make this a priority in my class because students are much more willing to try a book when I am able to talk about it and when their friends can talk about it also.  My search for children's book started using a social media tool found on www.amazon.com where I soon discovered that I could make a search for books I read and enjoyed, and one of the options that appears on the page is the "Listmania!".  Through this feature, I essentially built my classroom library.  Listmania! is a feature where users of Amazon can create lists of books that they like or that fit a similar genre.  Depending on the user, the lists can be quite extensive with comments about individual books and ideas of what type of reader would enjoy it.  I never thought that I was actually using social networking during this time, but after working through my inquiry project, I realize now this is exactly what I was doing.  My interest in engaging my students to read and learning about more books prompted me to investigate Shelfari (www.shelfari.com) as part of this project.  Shelfari takes the ideas of Listmania! and allows the user to create an individual "shelf" of book.  I immediately started to search for the books I have read in order to add them to my shelf on Shelfari.  The shelf looks very similar to the display used by Apple for their books app.  

  
In Shelfari, I am able to organize the books according to books I have read, plan to read, or that I am reading.  There are features that allow me to rate the books out of five stars, write a review, and get recommendations of similar books.  Like most Web 2.0 tools, Shelfari has much more to offer than just displaying books.  A feature which would be very useful in engaging readers and providing them with exposure to new books is the ability to create discussion groups.  Students would be responsible for contributing to the group much like a reading group in the classroom.  Casey Oberhauser, a middle school teacher in Ohio observed that "Shelfari is able to do what I often struggle to achieve: create both exposure to and motivation for reading books they normally would not read."  (2011, p.28)  My initial intentions with Shelfari involved first setting up my own shelf with books I have available in my classroom library.  Step two would be to make the site accessible my students and their families so they can discover books at home.  In the future I would be interested in using the group discussion feature, but I am not sure if this will be accessible to my fifth grade students.  I realize I have only scratched the surface with Shelfari, and I am excited about how easy it is to update books as well as add very specific comments and reviews that would be useful for my students.  I have introduced my students to the site by demonstrating on the interactive whiteboard in my class, and I hope by the end of the school year to have them accessing the site at home or on the laptop in my classroom for picking new books.  An asset of most Web 2.0 tools is that the tool itself can be engaging for students, and I hoping this is the case with Shelfari.  Oberhauser also noted that "Shelfari is so appealing to students due to its social and interactive nature that they are virtually unaware that they are maturing as readers."  (2011, p.29)  Shelfari even allows a user to post their shelf to their blog as you can see at the bottom of this blog. 


As I see more and more readers using tools like Kobo, Kindle, or an iPad to read books, I think it is more important than ever to adapt our libraries to the 21st century.  I cannot imagine society will ever lose the attractiveness of a book cover, but I can envision a time when the only way we glance through book covers is only in a virtual environment.

http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/bookcase/

Oberhauser, C., Kist, W., Tollafield, K.,  & Rudd, L. (2011).  Updates from the classroom: Students and teachers at work.  Ohio Journal of English Language Arts, 51(1), 27 - 30.  Retrieved November 30, 2011 from http://www.octela.org/Resources/PDF/OJELA/Vol_51.1.pdf