BiblioNasium

Do your students struggle finding just right books?  Lucky for you, BiblioNasium has come to the rescue.  You might be wondering, what is BiblioNasium?  BiblioNasium is an online reading community for young students.  

Why Use BiblioNasium?

BiblioNasium is a platform that can help students become lifelong readers.  This community allows a class to keep track of their reading, recommend books, search for books, and connect with other readers in a fun way!  Watch this Welcome Video to learn the many benefits of using BiblioNasium with your class.  There are wonderful features on BiblioNasium for students, teachers, and parents.

BiblioNasium allows students to:

• search for books by the author, title or reading level
• select their avatar & change the background
• meet challenges presented by teachers & parents to win awards
• write recommendations
• find just right books (by interest and reading level)
• connect with their classmates about books they enjoy reading

BiblioNasium allows teachers to:

• recommend books
• create reading challenges for the whole class or individual students
• monitor and analyze what students are reading
• update students’ reading levels

BiblioNasium allows parents to:

• stay connected to their child’s reading
• view the books their child has read
• set up reading challenges for their children
• keep track of their child’s reading level

We want to provide the ideal learning environment for our students and BiblioNasium can help get us there!

Watch this tutorial to see how to get started with BiblioNasium

Getting Started with BiblioNasium by Leah Starr

What’s Next?

Let’s start using BiblioNasium with our students!   This can be integrated into the Reader’s Workshop as part of the Daily Five activities.  

Here are some ‘how to’ videos to share with students when getting started with BiblioNasium:

Change the avatar

Look at classmates bookshelves

Search for books

Use the reading log

Send & receive book recommendations

Here are some helpful resources for getting started with BiblioNasium:

https://www.diigo.com/user/lmstarr/PD-project

View the professional development presentation that can be used to introduce BiblioNasium to reading teachers:

BiblioNasium Presentation created by Leah Starr 

Collaborative Learning Environment: Edmodo

A collaborative online learning environment (CLE) can be a wonderful place for students, teachers, and families to create and share work.  I have experience with some collaborative learning environments, which include Google sites, docs, forms, and presentation as well as VT’s Young Writer’s Project.  I would like to further develop my experience with collaborative learning environments and have decided to try using the learning management system (lms), Edmodo this fall.  

Here are some strengths of Edmodo:

• Easy to facilitate class discussions 
• Allows for communication with families
• Students can collaborate with each other
• Teachers can collaborate with each other
• Easy to post assignments for students
• Students do not need an email address to access Edmodo
• Teachers can create polls & quizzes
• Easy to provide grades & feedback on assignments
• You can embed videos on the wall for class tutorials or discussions
• Teachers can keep a calendar for students to check due dates
• You can connect your Google Drive account to Edmodo

Check out these resources collected on Diigo to help make Edmodo easier to use:

Edmodo Resources

One downfall of using Edmodo is that students have one more place to log into instead of staying in their Google Account.  I would prefer if students could complete their work in the same account we are using as an LMS.  This will have to wait until Google Classroom is available to use as an LMS!

All in all, Edmodo is an effective, easy to use LMS.  I’m looking forward to more online collaboration this coming school year.  I am excited that my class will have a place to view, discuss, and collect assignments online.