It appears that books will be still around for some time in our
classrooms, whether in paper or some other form. Teachers and students
can enhance the reading experience with some easy to use educational
technology tools. Here are ten websites I selected for their usefulness,
their navigational simplicity, and for the fact that they are all free!
GOODREADS
Goodreads is the world’s largest site for readers and book
recommendations. The site is intended for use by students over age 13.
Here are a few things that you can do on Goodreads:
- See which books your friends are reading.
- Track the books you’re reading, have read, and want to read.
- Check out your personalized book recommendations. Our recommendation engine analyzes 20 billion data points to give suggestions tailored to your literary tastes.
- Find out if a book is a good fit for you from our community’s reviews.
LITMAPPROJECT
Explore the world through literature with Litmapproject, the
geographic book database. Books are mapped onto the LitMap by where they
take place or the place they are about. They map nonfiction, fiction,
mystery, science fiction, any kind of literature that can be associated
with a specific geographic location.
BIBLIONASIUM
Biblionasium is a reading “community” where elementary and middle
school students can connect to share and connect about the books they
are reading. Teachers can create accounts for their students and get
started with relative ease.
BOOKADVENTURE
BookAdventure is a free site for students to take quizzes on books
and potentially earn prizes. I use this site as a place for students to
take practice tests before their actual tests on Accelerated Reader.
BookAdventure is for K-8 students.
BOOK WIZARD
Book Wizard is from the folks at Scholastic and is essentially a book
search tool. It helps educators find children’s books to meet their
instructional needs, suggest titles to motivate independent reading by
their students, and it also provides resources like information about
authors.
JIM TRELEASE – READ ALOUD
No list of resources about books should be without a reference to Jim
Trelease. He is now retired, but remains a premiere authority on
reading aloud to children. His site, which remains active, is your go to
source for information about high quality read alouds for your
students. I was fortunate to hear Jim speak twice during my teaching
career, and those two events had a large impact on the reading program
in my elementary classroom.
COMMON SENSE MEDIA
There are a lot of best book lists out there. CommonSenseMedia.org
has produced some outstanding lists for teachers, parents, and students
to use. They also have a plethora of other resources on their site.
BOOKLAMP
BookLamp is home to the Book Genome Project. Similar to how Pandora
matches music lovers to new music, BookLamp helps you find books through
a computer-based analysis of written DNA. There is no advertising and
books old and new are included in their recommendations.
EDUCATION.COM
Looking for tips on selecting top notch books to inspire the love of
reading? Seeking recommendations for books appropriate for children and
adolescents of all ages? Education.com has advice, book lists, and tips
from top nonprofit and university organizations to keep children
reading.
OXFORD OWL
Oxford Owl is an incredible collection of free children’s ebooks for
kids ages 3-11. Each ebook has accompanying audio so that students can
choose to read along, or read independently. The books also have
activities that focus on reading comprehension and story recall. There
are several options for filtering the ebooks so that students can find
just the right story including by age, by book type, and by series. In
addition to the ebooks on the site, you can find fun activities and
recommendations for each age group, games to print and play, and online
games with characters from the books and site.
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