Great Middle Grade Reads discussion

Have any of you tried using Biblionasium with your children or your classes?

http://biblionasium.com/#tab/all-books

I'd supported my sons (3rd and 5th grade) using Goodreads last summer, both to give them a place to publish the reviews they wrote as summer writing assignments and in hopes of getting some recommendations that they would accept, but wasn't thrilled with how it worked out. The Biblionasium site looks like it might be better. I've just signed them up, and we will see how it goes.

Are there other track-what-you-read/find recommendations sites aimed at the kids themselves that we should check out?

I only know of Scholastic's summer reading challenge http://www.scholastic.com/summer/

And fyi, this site is for adults, and children under the age of 13 are not supposed to have their own accounts. I'm sure you supervise their time on the internet, but this is like any other adult site in that it's fairly easy to bump into inappropriate images, etc.

Cheryl in CC NV wrote: "And fyi, this site is for adults, and children under the age of 13 are not supposed to have their own accounts. I'm sure you supervise their time on the internet, but this is like any other adult ..."

Cheryl ... which of the two sites above are you referring to?

Cheryl,

We took appropriate precautions and did not let my sons explore Goodreads on their own. My son's accounts are in some ways an extension of my own, but it was important that they had their own profiles so that the reviews and recommendations reflected their tastes and not mine.

I agree with your comments about even more than some sites Goodreads is clearly intended for ages 13 and up, and that many of their sidebar advertisements are not PG suitable (or even 13 - 17 appropriate). This is why we are actively looking for a kid-friendly alternative.

S.W., by 'this site' I mean GoodReads. Julie understands, as she clarified.
I only commented because I thought it needed to be said (that GR has a policy about not allowing accounts for minors and being for adults), just in case someone else reading this discussion didn't know.

Thanks Cheryl.... I was just clarifying as I thought the Biblionasium site sounded like a great place.

Thank you for your interest in BiblioNasium. We are a site designed especially for children under the age of 13. We connect them to their teachers, classmates, friends and parents only. They can catalogue their books, log their reading, setup challenges, win virtual rewards and exchange book recommendations. We also provide the reading level difficulty of the books so children can select books that "fit" their reading ability. Please join our Facebook and or Twitter connections to see some reviews and testimonials. We have had over 26,000 unique visitors since the beginning of this school year (Sept.2102) and were recently selected as one of top 10 exciting Edtech startups to watch. We welcome you to join and look forward to your comments and feedback. Warm Regards, Marjan Ghara, Founder & CEO.

Marjan wrote: "Thank you for your interest in BiblioNasium. We are a site designed especially for children under the age of 13. We connect them to their teachers, classmates, friends and parents only. They can c..."

Hi Marjan, I recently contacted you regarding your 'button' which you graciously provided to me. As promised, I'll be setting up a 'button' link to Biblionasium from my blog soon.
Cheers

Marjan,

I hope you will consider if there are ways to safely build interest or discussion groups outside the circles you discuss above. With just myself and my 2 sons participating, it's hard to get any peer recommendations of good things to read (and often if Mom suggests it, it's suspect).

Julie wrote: "Marjan,

I hope you will consider if there are ways to safely build interest or discussion groups outside the circles you discuss above. With just myself and my 2 sons participating, it's hard to ..."

Thank you Julie. We are thinking about how best to do that, so the recommendations remain relevant, even though they will be coming from people they dont know. Perhaps around interest and from people in the the same reading level?

In the meanwhile you can still build a community for them by inviting a few of their friends, through their parents of course, and connect them to a community of people they know. Invite their cousins, summer camp friends, sports buddies ...
There is an "Invite Friends" option on the parent site.

You can also ask their teacher to join and they become automatically connected to the entire class. We have had the most success, when the teacher sets up the classroom and sets up their Favorite and Recommended list for the entire class to see. Then classmates are also connected and exchange book recommendations.

We have many plans for the platform and appreciate all the feedback and comments. Please feel free to contact us directly from the site.

S.W. wrote: "Marjan wrote: "Thank you for your interest in BiblioNasium. We are a site designed especially for children under the age of 13. We connect them to their teachers, classmates, friends and parents o..."

Thank you S.W. for your support.

Cheryl in CC NV wrote: "And fyi, this site is for adults, and children under the age of 13 are not supposed to have their own accounts. I'm sure you supervise their time on the internet, but this is like any other adult ..."

That is why on BiblioNasium, we have taken the extra pre-caution and only Children's and Teen titles are displayed in the BOOK SEARCH results.

Thank you Marjan. If my children were still young, I'd definitely be using your resource.

I'd be hesitant about limiting discussions/suggestions by reading level. As the parent of 2 who's Lexile ranking is well above typical for their grade (view spoiler)[(3rd & 5th graders whose Lexiles were >900 according to the MAPS tests they took at the beginning of the year) (hide spoiler)] I don't want to deprive them of recommendations for books appropriate to their age/grade just because they would be "easy" especially if this is for leisure reading and on the flip side am concerned that their Lexile ranking alone would expose them to inappropriate YA content. Similarly, perhaps a struggling reader would be drawn into a harder book because other peers liked it.

I would lean more towards genre and cohorts of grades (e.g. K-2, upper elementary 3-5, middle school 6-8) understanding that different school districts have different structures. The caveat with the comment above is that I'm just a mom of two bookworms and a lifelong bibliomaniac not a trained educator.

Julie wrote: "I'd be hesitant about limiting discussions/suggestions by reading level. As the parent of 2 who's Lexile ranking is well above typical for their grade [spoilers removed] I don't want to deprive t..."

Thank you for your feedback. What you describe is the reason we started by connecting kids to their friends, classmates and people they know. Those book recommendations will be more interesting to children.

We are however collaborating on a very interesting project to develop a recommendation engine for children's books that takes into account interest, genre, reading level and the "social Q" of a book. Hopefully we will be able to share news about that very soon.

Stayed tuned and please do keep in touch.

I was SO excited to discover Biblionasium as I believe a social reading network is just the thing to motivate my students to read.

You can imagine my dismay, however, when, after setting up a test account for a student I did a category search for "Knitting" which resulted not only in a list of books on knitting for kids but "Knitting Lingerie Style"…definitely not appropriate for the under 13 crowd.

Once I saw that, I decided to see what else might turn up (Heaven knows, kids try searching all types of things) so searched, "vibrator", which showed me options for "vibrator toys". When I clicked on that, one of the books that came up was, "Em and Lo's Sex Toy: An A to Z Guide to Bedside accessories". Of course, the next step was searching, "sex", which brought up a number of interesting titles including, "S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Guide to Get You Through High School and College" and "Sex: A Book for Teens: An Uncensored Guide to Your Body, Sex, and Safety" that features a silhouetted picture of two cows having sex on the front cover.

I don't think I will be signing up my 4th graders for this site just yet.

Elissa wrote: "I was SO excited to discover Biblionasium as I believe a social reading network is just the thing to motivate my students to read.

You can imagine my dismay, however, when, after setting up a tes..."

We've contacted Biblionasium about how they filter content and are waiting for their reply.

I received this reply from Biblionasium:


Thank you for being so kind as to bring this to our attention. Yes, we learned this morning from a user that there is an issue with the SEARCH feature and our technical team is investigating it now. We do have filters and safeguards in place that are intended to prevent inappropriate terms from showing up in our SEARCH and SEARCH results. So something clearly is wrong.

We are working on fixing this issue -- it definitely is NOT intentional!

Again, thank you for taking the time to write us. It truly is appreciated.

Warm Regards,
The Team at BiblioNasium

Dear Elissa

Thank you again for your note. We appreciate and share your concern.

Just to clarify, BiblioNasium ONLY returns titles that are tagged under "Children" or Teen/Young Adult" categories. Those categories are determined by the publishers or by Amazon, as we use Amazon's catalogue. Surprisingly and unfortunately the titles that you mentioned are actually categorized under Teen/Young Adult in Amazon.

Since there are millions of book titles, we rely on the meta-tags and the categories to filter the results.

Also we already block over 450+ inappropriate words or terms from our Search Auto-Complete and we add new ones as we learn of any new ways of spelling them.

We also blocked all those 450+ terms from being submitted to Search altogether. What we cannot control, is if you type in "knitting" which is not a "flagged/blocked" word, that the result will not include "Knitting Lingerie" which is a book that is legitimately catalogued under "Teen/Young Adult" by the publisher.

But all the inappropriate words that we could think of and their variations are now also blocked from being submitted.

We welcome our users feedback and want you to know that we share your concerns. We also pride ourselves in being responsive and hope our actions have helped ease your mind.

We look forward to your participation and if you have any concerns or questions, please contact me directly at
marjan@biblionasium.com

Warm Regards
Marjan Ghara
Founder, CEO - BiblioNasium

Dear Marjan,

Thank you so much for your immediate response to my feedback on your site.

I am still considering whether I want my fourth graders to have the possibility of doing searches on "teen/young adult" categories as we teachers are accountable for anything they see online that is inappropriate, whether we know about it or not and even though teachers obviously have no control over whether or not a student puts in a search term like "sex" or not.

I SO love the idea of students being able to have a forum like GoodReads to safely share their reading experiences with one another. I will discuss it with my principal and see what her thoughts are.

Thanks again.

Elissa Greene
4th Grade Teacher
California

Thanks again, BiblioNasium Team, for all your prompt replies to my suggestions and questions. I am looking forward to trying out your site with my class. I think it will tie in extremely well with Daily 5, which I am implementing in my room this year.

P.S. Thank you for suggesting a screen video sharing appointment; I would like to take you up on that at some point.

Elissa wrote: "Dear Marjan,

Thank you so much for your immediate response to my feedback on your site.

I am still considering whether I want my fourth graders to have the possibility of doing searches on "teen..."

Dear Elissa
I wanted to let you know that we were very troubled and surprised by the Search results you got and could not understand how we could have missed these titles before.

So we kept on digging and finally found the root of the problem that I would like to share here.

Amazon recently, and without any notice that we saw, changed their TEEN category to TEEN & YOUNG ADULY category. They must have done this right around the time you first got on our site about two weeks ago. They added over 100K YA titles to the same class of books we were using the search for TEEN titles. And Young Adult books have many inappropriate images and titles for young children.

We immediately blocked the entire category of Teen & Young Adult and will working to find a way around it.

We appreciate your communication with us and want to assure you that we really do care about these things. I have two young children myself, so I personally appreciate the need for a gate as well.

We look forward to a positive experience for you and your students. As always contact us with any issues.

Marjan

Marjan wrote: "Dear Elissa
I wanted to let you know that we were very troubled and surprised by the Search results you got and could not understand how we could have missed these titles before.

So we kept on d..."

Thank you so much, Marjan for your amazing open response to our members. Your sincerity is obvious and I'm sure that our members appreciate the attention that you have given this.
Cheers