Scholastic Book Wizard App Review

I recently told you all about the awesome starter collection of books my student teaching class gave to me at the end of my internship. Well, those books sparked a new obsession for me. I have always loved children's books, specifically picture books, and now I have a valid reason to hoard collect them.

With my growing collection of books, I started considering how I might organize them in the future. It isn't exactly practical for me to start buying bins and grouping them without a classroom but I needed some sort of organization or way to track what books I have.

Enter: Scholastic Book Wizard App

This app links up to Scholastic.com and allows you to add books to your booklist using your smart phone. I have ended up really liking the app and finally having a method for keeping track of my books so I wanted to share it with those of you who might not have seen it before. Who doesn't love a nice organized booklist? Plus, the app is free, so there's that!

Here is a general run down of what to expect. 

First step is adding your books to your scholastic booklist. I'm making a few assumption here. First, that you've already gathered your own collection of books and  second, that you have Scholastic account.

There are three ways to add a book to your book list.

1. Scan the barcode on the book in the app.

2. Search the Title or Author in the app.

3. Search the Title or Author on the Scholastic website. 

Once you have your books all added to the booklist, you can view the list. (Makes sense right?) There are two ways to view your booklist, either on the app or on the Scholastic website. 

When you view the booklist online, you get the option to download, print, or email the list. I didn't know about the download option when I first found the app but it made me very happy! 

Here is a little about what you can expect when you download your list into Excel. You'll notice there is a bunch of stuff in the first few columns that you don't really need, or at least I didn't. Booklist Owner Name, Booklist Name, Booklist Description, and Booklist Comment columns weren't really useful and just looked cluttered so I took them out right away.

After a little formatting of the table, I added in a few new columns. First I added a column to track the number of copies I have of each book since I've got a few duplicates. I also added in a genre and topic column for future use. This information is provided on the online booklist at scholastic.com but I guess it wasn't important enough for the spreadsheet. Here is a peek at my list after my changes. Much easier to read. 

SUMMARY

Overall, I like the app! It saved me a ton of time gathering info on each book and I love that I can quickly access my list anywhere. Even though the exported Excell spreadsheet isn't perfect, it is a useful option. Word of caution though, if you change around the spread sheet too much from the original, it will make transferring new books difficult. When I add a new book to my custom booklist spreadsheet, I just open the newest version from the website and copy and past the new books' info.

I give it a 4 out 5. Not perfect, but for a free app it's worth getting.

• It's completely free!

• Gives you accurate book level info.
• Variety of information provided.
• Create a variety of lists and easily add books to multiple lists at one time.
• Easily export into an Excel spreadsheet.
• Access to your classroom library on the go.

• Doesn't allow you to add multiple copies of a book.
• Not all books are in the data base.
• A few gaps of info on some of the books.
• AR Level and Points NOT included.
• No option to sort when viewing the booklist on the app.

*The only con that really irked me was that not all books are in the database. There were a few Beginning Readers and Hello Readers that I couldn't find. Not all books are in the data base. I also had to manually add my awesome New Zealand books from Erin at Learning to Be Awesome.*

Hopefully a few of you find this review useful. If you are in the need of a good method to organize your classroom library, I would recommend you check out this app. If you have another app you use and like, feel free to share that as well!