Capturing imaginations with Reading Cloud

The Reading Cloud is an advanced online reading community designed to engage students, parents, teachers and librarians in reading for pleasure.

By taking full advantage of the latest technologies, Reading Cloud captures the imagination of students, linking real and virtual reading experiences to drive up literacy standards and develop core reading skills.

In this blog post, we’ll look at some ways to promote reading within your school library and across your school community via our effective and innovative school library management system.

Here are 10 fabulous facts you may not know about Reading Cloud powered by Junior Librarian.net:

1. The Reading Cloud is a secure online reading community just for your school.
2. Pupils have a personal reading profile – complete with an avatar and can add their own class mates as friends and create their own little home library which their friends can then see.
3. At school, at home and on any device a child can search for a book in the library catalogue. Type in dinosaurs and the books available appear onscreen complete with front cover image and book summary, if available a video of the author could play talking about that book.
4. Children can go to the library to take out the book they have chosen and can do so independently by scanning the book out themselves.
5. Pupils can become authors and write a review which pins itself to the book and appears in the library catalogue for other children to read or they could blog about books they have enjoyed and favourite authors using the blogging tool.
6. The Reading Cloud will recommend books and authors children may like to read next that can be found in the school library, based on pupil’s borrowing history.
7. The Homepage continually displays what’s trending with reading, new books, what’s popular, top reviews and a keyword cloud – all based around what children blog about, chat about, search for and borrow.
8. For teachers there are lots of reporting tools to see who reads & who doesn’t, what’s popular across year groups and within each tutor group such as by gender and ethnicity.
9. Promoting reading for pleasure is a key focus of the Reading Cloud and using the reading lists function helps signpost resources for pupils & meet curricular requirements.
10. Coming soon to the Reading Cloud: Our new Impact Through Reading survey can help pupils on their journey towards reading improvement as it measures how pupils view themselves as readers. Results can inform and assist with focussing resources to ensure schools help pupils develop a lifelong love of reading.

An abridged version of this article first appeared in the UK Literacy Association June 2018 e-Newsletter. Sue Polchow is Literacy & Library Adviser for ESS Reading Cloud, a chartered librarian who has worked extensively in the school libraries primary and secondary sector both as a school librarian and schools library services adviser.