Thursday, June 12, 2008

Be a Book Wizard!

Embed this new widget, Teacher Book Wizard, in your website or blog and anyone can use it to find children's books by author, keyword or title.

Scholastic has used Google gadgets to create an excellent teacher resource, a children's literature search engine. When you find the book you listed, you will receive information about the reading and interest levels, as well as purchasing information.

You can search for your favorite book or new titles to help you develop an instructional unit. I selected a variety of keywords to use in the Teacher Book Wizard Widget and a representative list of available books on the topic were found and listed by this search engine.

I embedded this widget in mymindtoyourmind widget wiki. It will make a nice addition to the variety of other widgets that I previously recommended for use by teachers.

Many of the titles are published by Scholastic, yet the search engine results do include book titles from other publishers in this search engine. This search engine is not perfect by any means, so I would encourage you to also use other search engines like Xoost for hard-to-find titles.


When readers at your blog, wiki, or website use the Teacher Book Wizard Widget, they will be taken away from your site to the Scholastic site. I would like to see this widget open in another tab or window. While this is an inconvenience, it is not a major hindrance.
clipped from www.scholastic.com
Scholastic.com
Teach
Teacher Book Wizard Widget
What is the Teacher Book Wizard Widget and how do I use it?
FREE ultimate children's book search engine
The widget will help teachers find:
  • Book and author information
  • Reading levels
  • Book-based lesson plans, booktalks and discussion guides
  • Series lists
  • embed the Teacher Book Wizard Widget onto your Web site or blog.
     blog it
    Zemanta Pixie

    5 comments:

    samccoy said...

    Considering this blog is housed at Google/Blogger, I was SHOCKED to discover that the gmodule search engine that Scholastic has developed cannot be embedded in my blog or in a blog posting.

    I suspect that it may be a Scholastic issue, but it is a very big problem for multitude of teachers who use Google/Blogger.

    I am sorry to say that there are INTEROPERABILITY issues for Scholastic to deal with before we can help them spread the word about this widget, much less use it from our own blogs.

    I look forward to hearing from other teachers using WordPress, Edublogs, Vox or other blog hosting sites. HELP, LET ME KNOW IF THIS WIDGET WORKS on your blog.

    Amber said...

    This would be a great widget to have, but when I post the code onto my teacher Ning it only shows Google ads within the widget box. I'm going to see if I can get some sort of technical support from Scholastic on this. Fingers crossed. Would be a great thing for the teachers to have access to.

    samccoy said...

    Thanks for your personal input on the problems you experienced after downloading the Scholastic Book Wizard widget onto your teacher Ning network.

    Let me know what solution Scholastic provides. I would like to use this widget for its potential to provide helpful information about books that students read.

    Unknown said...

    I don't know much about widgets, so I just went to the Scholastic.com site for the Book Wizard. It is a cool tool that I let my students use to find their own books. They spend loads of time browsing the book covers to find books they are interested in. My kids are savvy enough to know their reading levels, so they get books they can understand and enjoy.

    samccoy said...

    Mark, I think using this widget at the Scholastic site is an appropriate use.
    I am very happy that your students enjoy it. I know that I always enjoy browsing through the books.
    Isn't it exciting that your students know their reading level? That means that they are independent thinkers.