Blessed to Teach and Read

Our county Media Specialist, Susan Grigsby , has asked us to post a "shelfie" of the books that we've read this summer.  I remembered that I could update my  Shelfari app, and since the books that I've finished to date all fit onto 3 shelves, I snapped a picture.  These same books are in the Shelfari to the right.  Just click through. ----> I was trying to start reading through this year's  Georgia Book Award Nominee Finalists for grades 4-8, but that was starting to get costly.  So, I looked at what books I could check out from my local Gwinnett County Public Library on my Overdrive app for iPad.   ALL of the books above are digital content downloads.   All of them .  Knowing that some of them would be returned as the days ticked down to the due date actually motivated me to finish reading some of them.   This naturally lead me to reflect on my Follett wish list for the upcoming school year.  Almost all the books...

I stumbled upon Reading Rewards last week when I was Googling ideas for the creation of a new reading log for this upcoming school year. I thought I'd go ahead and make a new log/system to track students' nightly reading while I had all of this summer break time on my hands. I had planned to start having parents sign their child's log each night to help me better track daily reading homework. While perusing documents, I clicked on Reading Rewards. It seems to be free and really awesome! It is similar to Good Reads , but doesn't require students to imput their own e-mail account. It allows a teacher to set up a class and assign usernames and passwords. The premise is that students earn one virtual "dollar" for every minute they read. Then, the reward comes from their parent(s). Parents decide on rewards with students and help them set goals. Once students have earned a certain number of "dollars", students can redeem those dollars for the...