Look what I made!!

So as a future English teacher, I thought this was the coolest!

http://www.librarything.com/home/benoitme

I wanted to try out a librarything because I have so many books lying around from all the English classes I’ve taken. I, also, as a pre-service teacher keep getting book lists from high school teachers. I decided it would be a great idea to actually organize these books. That way when I need to see what I have or what is a book I could possible teach, I don’t have to search through boxes. It made me really look at my collection of books and see what novels I’ve had to read over the years. I, also, chose to include some books I read in high school. I tried to tag them into categories, but also keep it so I didn’t have a million categories with one book in each. I finally figured out towards the end, you can tag things more than once (duh!), so then I went back and did that.

I think it’s going to be a really useful tool to have in the future. It’s so easy to add to and comment on; plus there are a ton of groups to join to learn even more. I commented on twelve of the seventy novels I put up. I wrote a little description and each and why/ how I think it can be used in a classroom setting. I even wrote if I thought it would be better for high school or middle school. I then went ahead and rated each book; this made me decide how much I liked it or how useful it could be. I really enjoyed playing with this and spent several hours carefully picking my choices and making sure I didn’t forget anything (type A personality or what?!). I plan to continue to add to it in the future.

I feel like I could even incorporate this into my classroom. It might even be a cool way to create a book list for students; instead of sending home a typed one, I could post them all online and let the kids see what the books are about. They could pick one to read and when they were finished, rank it and leave a comment. Another idea would be for students to each have their own librarything, which lists the books they have read in middle and high school. They can tag all their books, as well as rate them. Then as the year goes on they can add to their list and write comments about them. I think this is an awesome way to get them reflecting and thinking about books and use technology.

Ok well that's my two cents on that. Definitely check it out and play around. It's really fun! :)