Classroom Organizer Breakthrough

When your classroom library has over 500 titles, how are you supposed to keep track of them? For eight long years, I used a handwritten chart. Students wrote their name, book title, book tub number, date checked out, and eventually, the date checked in. It worked well enough, but it wasted paper, and it was hard to determine who had checked out books for an extended period of time.

A few years back, I came across Booksource on Twitter. They were offering a promotion for a free copy of Brian Selznick’s Wonder Struck. I entered the competition, and for about the second time in my life, I won a contest! (I also won $100 during blackout bingo at after-prom my senior year of high school.) I began to follow the Booksource, and soon discovered they had a free program called the Classroom Organizer for teachers to use to check out books to students. In fact, some teachers were letting students check out books to themselves the program was so easy.

In January 2013, I was hesitant to change from my chart to the Classroom Organizer in the middle of the school year, so I waited. I learned how the program works and began importing my classroom titles into my Booksource account by scanning ISBNs. At the time, I didn’t have a smart phone, so I tried using an iPad the school had given me. The camera quality was not nearly as good as an iPhone, I soon discovered. Books that wouldn’t scan for me would easily scan on my students’ iPhones. I enlisted a small army of students to help me scan titles. All they had to do was download the free Classroom Organizer app, and then I entered my account’s information. Eventually, I bought an iPhone, and one of the first apps I downloaded was the Classroom Organizer. (I get such a kick out of adding a book to my library by scanning it. My brain receptors probably fire off the same way for when I get a text message or a Twitter notification! Ha!) I couldn’t wait to start the 2013-2014 school year using a 21^st century system.

Looking back on this past school year, I’m very happy with how the app worked. Many of my students were impressed with the capabilities of the Classroom Organizer app. I was happy with its weekly email feature that told me when students had overdue books. That made it so much easier to keep track of who was hoarding books. On the few days that my iPhone was dead or forgotten at home, I just told students to take books, and we would scan them the next day. This didn’t always happen, so I would sometimes revert to writing titles down on paper along with the students who had them. The app probably crashed once or twice a week, but it was fairly reliable, and it’s FREE, so I can’t complain.  Since I do not have a classroom computer, I check out the books on my iPhone. Part of me who wants to control everything wonders if all high schoolers would remember to check out books if they were given that chance. I have an extra iPad the school gave me, so maybe I could try using that this coming school year.

As I prepared for a new round of students earlier today, I needed to load students into my Classroom Organizer account. This feature is not available on the app, so you have to log in to the website, and as I clicked into my account, a sense of dread came over me. I remembered last year having to painstakingly copy each student’s name from my PowerTeacher account into the spreadsheet Booksource requires. An aside: elementary teachers could maybe type each name into the online spreadsheet, but I have 130 students, so I would much rather use the Excel spreadsheet option. The required columns are Last Name and First Name, but my grade book presents students’ names as Last Name, First Name, e.g., Farrand, Sam.

The comma was causing problems. If only there were a way to have Excel automatically separate the names into the two columns and eliminate the comma! My gut told me this was possible. Why hadn’t I googled this last year? Sure enough, Microsoft explained how to do this. What relief! What would have taken over an hour only took a few seconds. And now my students are loaded and ready to go for this coming Wednesday. I wonder how many books I can check out on the first day of school.

Classroom Library Reboot

Yesterday I made some of the final touches in preparing my classroom library for another year of use for my Pre-AP English 2 and creative writing students. I have had a classroom library since my first year of teaching back in 2005 when I taught 7th and 8th grade literature. I still have a few books in my library that my middle school students bought for me at our school’s book fair. I know because I saw the donation sticker when I was sorting. My library was much smaller then, and I have grown it over the years in a number of ways:

1. buying used books online for pennies (the $3.99 shipping is what costs)
2. buying books at the Friends of the Library sale for super cheap (maybe your state has something similar)
3. using Barnes & Noble gift cards to stock my shelves
4. books gifted to me by students
5. Scholastic Warehouse sales
6. spending my hard-earned cash on hardcovers I can’t wait for (titles have recently included Winger by Andrew Smith and We Were Liars by e. lockhart)

Back to the revisions that I made to my library. I have my books divided by genres into tubs, which something I saw firsthand in a classroom of my colleague Kari Steele when we taught middle school together. Until this summer I had tubs devoted to Chick Lit, but I decided this was unfair because I discovered I had guy students who enjoyed the occasional romance story. Chick Lit tubs became Romance tubs.

In my efforts to weed my library, I discovered some duplicate titles, but I didn’t want to get rid of all of them. In fact, I thought I would create a tub called “Read with a Friend,” an idea I remembered reading about in this Franki Sibberson article. Now, I realize I teach high school, not elementary, but I think my teens will enjoy this tub. I’ll have to keep you posted on how it goes. If you look at the picture closely, you’ll notice there’s currently only one copy of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, but that’s because I have the other copy at home for a presentation next month.

I already had tubs dedicated to nonfiction and memoir, and I think it was just this past year that I decided to organize my memoir tubs a little more. Subcategories included men, women, intense, humor, war and adventure, and classics. I realized my copy of Bossypants was missing when I looked through my tubs yesterday. This happens, and I usually replace books when I can.

My nonfiction books, on the other hand, were scattered across four tubs with little rhyme or reason. They needed the same treatment as my memoir books, so I came up with war and crime, American history, sociology, and science. My goal is to add another tub or two of nonfiction this coming year, but I’m not sure yet what those will be. Maybe a psychology tub?

My final change was to expand my singular Oklahoma author and setting tub into two distinct ones. This past school year I required my students to read either a book set in Oklahoma or written by a current or former Oklahoman. In order to make the books easier to find, they got a tub, but as I increased my search of these books, they no longer fit into one tub. Voila!

In all, I have 66 tubs in my classroom library, and it took nine years to get to this point. I’m sure I will make other tweaks and changes in the future, but what will not change is my dedication to giving my students an opportunity to become lifelong readers.

Favorite Books: 2012-2013

At the start of this school year, I challenged my students to read 20 books a year, 10 books per semester. To wrap up this school year, I asked my students to choose at least one favorite book of the entire school year, not just this semester. Some students just gave me one title, but quite a few gave me multiple titles, which made me happy. A few students had to rack their brains to land on a title, but others knew immediately which book was their favorite.

I put all the titles into a PowerPoint. I initially had students add their own slides, but some of my sophomores could not handle such a responsibility. One student, instead of getting the image of his favorite book, opened my My Photos folder and inserted a picture of me that I had on hand for a bulletin board. I was working on other things in the classroom, and students were supposed to just go up one at a time and add their slides. Anyway, I quickly retook the reigns and was able to power through all my students and their titles in about two class days at the start of class. Of course, some students were absent, so I had to wait for their return and for their titles. I didn’t want to leave anyone out. Then I found this helpful video on how to convert a PowerPoint 2007 into a video.

Basically, I had to save all the slides of my PowerPoint as JPEGs and then import them into Windows MovieMaker. I did all this on my school’s computer because my laptop is way old and needs replaced. Besides, I had already created the PowerPoint during class time. It only made sense to finish the video at school. I typed up a script for the introduction to the video and recorded it using Sound Recorder, found in the Accessories > Entertainment folders. It took me a while to realize I needed to zoom in on all my slides to make the audio last the perfect length. Anyway, here’s the result, which I will share with my current and future students:

Note: My school computer could not link up to YouTube, so I had to save the MovieMaker file to my flash drive, move it to my laptop, and upload it to YouTube from my laptop.