Amanda Pape's List: Some Examples of Using LibraryThing in Educational Settings

Here's a classroom library example:

"I teach second grade, and I am fairly new to LT. I have been entering my personal library since early spring [2011]. My plan is to not only be able to locate books that I know I own and frequently have trouble locating, but also share my books by theme and author with my students. As I have entered each book, I have used address labels to tag each book as I have in my LT library. I am going to use those tags to print just the covers of those books with the same tags. For instance, in the Fall I will print on tag board my book covers tagged apples, pumpkins, and Fall. Then I will laminate these picture sheets with those themes. Each of my students is assigned a number on the first day of school. It is determined by where their names fall in ABC order in the class list. This is important because at the beginning of each week, each student will choose several (exact number yet to be determined) of my books and find those book covers on my laminated sheet and write their number on top of the picture of the book cover. They will use an expo marker so it can easily be erased. I will spend a few minutes collecting the books every couple of days and erase their numbers as books are returned. Since each book cover is labeled on the back, each child should be capable of matching the picture on the back of each book with the picture on the basket so that students can shelf them without much help from me. I don't know how much sense this makes to anyone reading this, but I am very excited to have found an easy way to share books, keep them organized, make my kiddos responsible, and do it all quickly."

This teacher-in-training uses LibraryThing. The link is to a page on her website where she links to her LibraryThing account and also employs a LibraryThing widget. Here's what she said in mid-December, 2011:

'I am a student at the University of Mary Washington. I just finished my Student Teaching on Friday. Now I'm looking for a job in an elementary school. The suffixes are meant to show just that. Certain children's books repeat word chunks which help students learn to read and recognize them. This way I can use trade books to target specific chunks in reading centers or guided reading to give very young children plenty of exposure to them. I used my textbook, "Literacy in the Early Grades" by Gail E. Tompkins to give me guidance on what books to check out.

I am also using LibraryThing to remember which books I want to use to re-enforce different reading strategies, genres, and story structures. For every unit I'd like to have a resource bucket related to that unit where students can practice their skills on more than just the basal reader.

Have you heard of anyone introducing parents to LibraryThing? I'd like to use it as an alternative to reading logs, but I'm not sure whether it would catch on. I'd have to pilot it first."

"I am an elementary (Pre-K to grade 6; 4 to 12 year olds) school librarian in Boston, MA.

These are books I like to recommend to kids, with tags to make them easier to find.

I use LT to keep track of books I like and use so that when I get requests for recommendations, I have a first place to go. I have a separate account for my personal books that I have at home.

I have also used LT to explain tagging and tag clouds to my students.

The FP tags are for Guided Reading (aka Fountas & Pinnell) levels. The SR tags are for my summer reading lists. I tag with the different grade levels and categories and use it to populate my reading lists."

Here's how this college-level children's literature instructor uses LibraryThing:

"I have been using LT in several children's literature classes (English 540 and Education 490) at University of Michigan since 2008. I've been having students log texts for current and future teaching ever since I began teaching these courses, and once it became clear that social media networks such as LT and GR existed and could be used, I have wanted students to know and explore them.

I ask that students in our Literature for Children and Young Adults in a Digital Age log 70 texts (tagging and rating them) and write at least 30 reviews to receive an A. I set up a group for the class, and invite everybody to join--which then makes it easy for me to check in on what students are doing re logging. Also, I occasionally post forum questions, and ask that students reply in Library Thing.

I am hoping that LibraryThing can become an ongoing resource for them beyond the semester--but it is really interesting how much I apparently need to point out. The students are pretty single-minded about what they "need" to do for the class, and they don't tend to explore LibraryThing's features--its groups, the way you can see what others have done re tagging and reviewing, etc.--unless nudged a bit.

Personally, I think it is very useable, and user-friendly. Way better than note cards and other formats for logging. I used to offer options, but now I just have them all use LibraryThing."

"This will be my second year teaching 4th grade and I mostly organize by level (and alphabetical by author's last name within the levels), but I also have separate sections for series, popular authors, non-fiction, non-leveled picture books, etc.

You can check out my organizing scheme on my profile page under 'tags used for inventorying'."