Thursday, May 10, 2012

Thursday is App Day! Book Crawler App

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am a extremely passionate about reading children’s books and my avid reading helps give book recommendations to children and colleagues.  Over the years, I have tried various ways of logging books that I’ve read, want to read, and want to recommend to others. I have used mini-notebooks mostly to keep track of my many books and TBR lists. 

Last summer, my principal introduced me to the Book Crawler app – thank you Grace!  With this app, I can automatically scan the barcode of books and it automatically downloads the book cover photo, title, author, and publisher information onto my iPad and iPhone!  I can also organize my lists of books by genre, collections I created, authors, book titles, or the Tags that I set up.  For example, some collections I have set up are: children’s chapter books, picture books, Children’s books to read, professional books, professional book to read, books I loaned (which is so helpful since kids throughout the school come to my classroom to borrow books!), nonfiction, poetry, read alouds, and books checked out at public library.  By sorting my lists by collection, I can easily recommend books I’ve read and be reminded of which books are in my TBR stacks. 
         
Book Crawler also allows you to rate the book with up to 5 stars and write a comment to trigger your memory about the book or to prepare for a book club conversation by jotting notes in the comment section.  This app makes my trips to Barnes & Noble, independent book stores, and the public library much easier because instead of writing down all the titles I want to read, I can just scan the bar code on the back of the books with my iPhone or iPad and I instantly have all the information I need. 

I’d love to hear about other apps you use to keep track of books read and TBR lists/stacks!
Happy Reading!  

2 comments:

  1. Book Crawler sounds interesting! I use Goodreads and they have an app as well. I'm getting ready to begin using Booksource's classroom organizer to put my entire classroom library online. Then I can add my students next year and they can check out with it. Then you can run late notices and see where your books are.

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  2. I Love that you can scan books in this app! Adding this one to my ad too!

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