unapologeticallyb00kish

Biblionasium: A Social Reading Experience For Students Under 13 – LIS 568

How do you interact with a reading community? Do you follow BookTok, Bookstagram, or BookTube? Do you engage with fellow readers on Goodreads, Fable, the StoryGraph, or Reddit? For many individuals, social interaction is an important aspect of reading.  Biblionasium, an app designed for students 13 years old and under, enables students in elementary and middle grades to participate in the social aspect of reading. 

This app has amazing features, and I’m excited to try it out with my middle school library club students. While I’ve been able to read about Biblionasium and explore its features, I’ve been unable to utilize it with students thus far. I can see this as a good tool for mock Newbery club members to keep track of their reading and provide feedback and reviews to share with other club members.

One of my favorite features is that librarians, teachers, parents and students all have the capacity to create reading challenges. They can set the parameters of the challenge by selecting start and end dates and choosing whether to base the challenge on the number of minutes, pages, or specific books.  

To set up their bookshelf, students begin by adding the title they want to log. The book will appear in their reading log, enabling them to track their progress. Only books that students read after their Biblionasium account is created can be counted toward book challenges, although students are welcome to record books that they’ve already read, as they won’t show up in the reading log to be tracked. 

Other Exciting Features –

Librarians/Teachers/Educators can

• Create virtual bookshelves and booklists to share with students
• Have access to students’ virtual bookshelves and see their favorite books and reading history.

 Students can

• Customize personalized bookshelves
• Share book reviews with other students 
• Earn badges for completion of different reading tasks
• Discover new books 

Areas for Improvement – 

• Not all links are active. Under the resources tab, the Newbery Medal and Notable Children’s books are attached to links that go to the ALA page, but have an error code page not found.

Member Support –

• The blog and help center tab includes several small tutorials and FAQs about commonly encountered problems. It also provides digital citizenship resources and several printables.

• There are several protections in place for young people. Biblionasium complies with COPPA and is compliant with Ed Law 2d. Children’s accounts must be created by their parent or an educator, and no email addresses are collected. Their privacy policy, linked here, is thorough and easily located.  The child has an anonymous username that they can share with friends to connect, and only parents/educators know the student’s real name. 

I look forward to utilizing Biblionasium with my library club students. I’ve already created a bookshelf for them with titles that have been identified as potential Newbery books.