App/Website Review: Booksource Classroom Organizer

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They say you can never have too many books. We have a lot of them in our house – shoved in bookcases in various rooms and then boxes when the bookcases are full or the books have been outgrown. They also say it’s never too late to get organized. They are right on both accounts, and today’s tool helps bring order to the chaos of book hoarders teachers and parents everywhere.

Booksource is a wholesale distributor of books, but they do SO much more. They claim to be “literary experts with a passion to find those just right books for each and every student,” and they do just that. On their website, you can search do a typical keyword or author search for a specific book, but you can also browse by just about any category you can think of. Looking for Accelerated Reader books for your fourth graders with a particular Lexile level? No problem. Looking for a guided reading book for your students that will grab their attention while satisfying your teaching requirements? No problem. The search options are incredible and can be fine-tuned for every situation.  They also offer collections of books that have been selected around a particular topic or theme, and they will work with you find the best titles to fit your curriculum. Of course, they do sell books (rather affordably, in fact), but even if you don’t buy the books, the information and the search capabilities are free to use!

But on to the main event, the star of this show, and one of my favorite things – Classroom Organizer. This tool allows you to catalog and manage your books and have a simple check out system in place. You don’t even have to have bought the books from Booksource, although it does interface nicely if you do buy books from them. After signing up for a free account, you can add your books through the website on your computer, through the iOS or Android app on your phone or tablet, or even upload the using a spreadsheet of ISBN numbers. From the ISBN number, it automatically pulls the details such as author, title, genre, etc., as well as a book cover image, and you can assign a location for where the book typically lives. Once the books are loaded in your library, you can view them all in a big list, or search the list using keywords, and see exactly where your books are! Create free student accounts and keep track of who has which of your books so you never lose one again!  So amazing!! And did I mention it’s all free??

When signing up at Classroom Organizer, make sure you choose Classroom Library, although if you do have a school bookroom, they have a tool where multiple teachers can access the catalog called School Portal. Both you and the students log in on this same screen using the Classroom ID and a generic password.

Once logged in, students choose their page, you choose yours, which is protected by a second password.

On your teacher page, you have access to all the cool stuff!  Of course, the library comes up first. You can see at a glance how many titles you have and it begins by listing them alphabetically. You can see the basic information, as well as the location and checkout status. The information you see can be adjusted in the settings to include more or fewer columns. You can add books here, but you’ll have to type the ISBN unless you have a barcode scanner hooked up to the computer.

The Booksource app (iOS, Android) lets you simply scan the barcode and add the book!

The ONLY thing I don’t like about this app is that it doesn’t seem to let you see or manipulate the location of the book from the app, it simply adds it to the library with no location. But it’s easy enough to go to the website and change the location there, and it certainly does save the time of typing all those ISBNs!

Of course, you have reports you can run if you use it more like a library management system and less like a personal catalog.

And you can add your students under your account. All the fields are optional (it doesn’t even have a place for an email address!) and you can access any account at any time to reset a password if needed. I like how you can also assign reading groups or levels for the students so you can easily keep track!

When students log in and select the student page, this is what they see:

To check out, they select their name from the list, and browse!

This is such a great way to keep track of your plethora of reading material! Is it at home? Did you take it to your classroom? Did you box it up in the attic? Lend it to a kid? Now you will know instantly! Do you already have this one? Log in and check before you buy a duplicate!  The initial investment of time up front to enter all your books is significant, but the scanning option on the app makes it go very quickly. I decided to start with all the books in my two-year-old son’s room (there were 95 in his room alone!) and it might have taken an hour or two to enter them into the system. But after everything is entered, you just have to add new ones as they arrive, since we all know you can never have too many books and now you can know exactly where to find them all!