My Newest Obsession - BooksApp

I have a new obsession... BooksApp!  

(FYI... get ready for my own personal infomercial.  I am LOVING this app and want to tell the world about it, heehee.  I am not being paid for my own personal advertisement, though that would be cool.  BooksApp, are you out there reading this?! haha!)

BooksApp 2 Pro

This app is AMAZING!!!  My friend and teammate Mel showed it to me recently, and I have been obsessed ever since!  With this app, I am able to scan and categorize all my books.  There is a Lite version that is free, but I paid the $3.99 to upgrade to BooksApp 2 Pro.  I knew after using the free version for a few days I would get sick of the advertisements in that version, plus I wanted the option to export my book lists, which you get with the Pro version.

Prior to this, I had an Excel spreadsheet with all my Teacher Read Aloud books in it.  It was always a pain to update when I got new books, and I didn't like all those pages taking up valuable space in my lesson plans binder.  And of course, I never had it with me when I actually needed it.

Now I'm so psyched to have all my books in my iPhone!  That way when I'm lesson planning at home I can just look up what books I want to use for my whole-group reading lessons.

What's even better is that now I won't buy DOUBLE of the same book.  Have you ever done that?!  You know, you go to Barnes and Noble and see a great sale and stock up, only to realize you already have those books?  Now I can just check my iPhone when I'm at the store to see if I already have the book.  And now that I've scanned my books I am realizing that I need to beef up some of my author collections.

Yesterday I stayed late to finish scanning all my books in.  Did you read that right?!  I stayed LATE.  On.  A.  Friday.

That is how obsessed I am with this app!

At school, I have all my Teacher Read Aloud books organized in my file cabinet.  This prevents them from getting dusty, and keeps kids hands OFF them.  LOVE my kiddos, but not their germs.  I have them organized in monthly folders, holiday folders, mentor text folders, character ed folders, author folders, etc.

This is what it looks like when you open the app.

You scan in your book using the app's built in "Barcode Scanner," and it searches Google Books for the book's information.  If your book isn't in Google Books, you can manually add it in there.

You can view all your books by title.  I LOVE how you can see a picture of the book's cover.  So cool.

You can add books to custom-made "Collections."  I set up my collections just as they are labeled in my file cabinet so I know EXACTLY where my book can be found when I open my file cabinet drawers.

Last night I started dabbling in the "Subjects" section of the app.  I started adding custom subjects.  I'm thinking of these subjects more as "Skills."  That way, when I'm looking for books to use to teach a certain reading or math skill (i.e. cause/effect, inferencing, predicting) I can just look up books by skill.  The best part that I've found is that you can add multiple "Subjects" for each book.  So if you have a book that is great for teaching both Cause/Effect AND Main Idea, you can put that book in both subject categories.  How cool is THAT?!  

I plan to add to the subjects section as I go.  I often get done reading a story to my class and think, "Oh this would be great when I'm working on Author's Purpose, too.  I need to remember that for next year."  So I'll be updating this a lot for the remainder of this year, and all through next year as I teach.

I'm so excited about this app!  It's definitely worth checking out... especially since there is a FREE version.  Woohoo!

Okay, informercial over.  You may now go back to enjoying your weekend!