Using Shelfari and Good Reads to Promote Reading in the Middle School Classroom

In my blog post on the use of reading workshop, I discussed Nancie Atwell's list of common lessons that teachers demonstrate about reading. In an effort to avoid demonstrating these misconceptions about reading to my students I have been working to make independent reading a part of our agenda regularly. When we do SSR, I demonstrate my love for reading by having a book of my own that I am reading. If it is a book that I think students will be interested in, I give a short book talk after SSR and invite students to talk about what they are reading as well.  

In addition, I have been exploring ways to use web 2.0 tools to make effective reader's workshops a reality. One of the primary challenges that I have faced in implementing the reader's workshop is my own lack of experience with great adolescent literature. Most of my experience with literature has been with early modern, modern, and post modern adult canonical fiction. As new a middle school teacher, I have been working on building my library and knowledge of quality literature that my students will find accessible. 

I have used Shelfari, the online bookshelf to catalog some of the adolescent fiction that I am interested in reading before I add it to my library. One of the things that I would like to do, but can't using Shelfari is to organize books that I have and would like to read by purpose: professional teaching, personal, and adolescent literature. 

Shelfari would be great as a tool in the classroom because it does allow you to create goals for reading and keep track of the books you have read, and write reviews about them. I would love to have my students use this tool next year in their reader's workshop as a part of their reading portfolios. Both Jim Burke and Nancie Atwell talk about the importance of reading logs and reading portfolios. This tool would enable students to easily track the books that they have read in the course of the school year. It would also help me to monitor their reading and reading goals. 

I also explored Goodreads, which is very much like Shelfari. I didn't like its dependence on Facebook and what Facebook friends are reading for my own purposes, but would share this with my students because they might like that feature.