Online communities

Online reading challenges offer children opportunities to discuss their reading, connect with others and receive recommendations for future reading from other readers. Online reading communities make reading more social. Readers participate in online social networks in several ways. There are apps that can be used. Goodreads is simple and can be accessed by smartphone. Students can track their reading, set yearly targets for themselves and post reviews. Litsy is a similar app, allowing users to share what they are reading, what they have read and what they would like to read. This could be a class activity to share reading interests and review collective class texts as well as personal ones.

A good place to look for advice is this link to Teresa Cremin’s work.

For reviewing and blogging as a group try Reading Cloud.

Good Reads see here.

See  https://www.biblionasium.com/#tab/content-fall-picks

On-line book clubs are a great community builder. Sedo (2003) found that face to face clubs tended to be formed from pre-existing interpersonal relationships rather than online book clubs. The discussions that take place online are likely to focus more on the books in question than in the face to face discussions. 

Commercial entities such as Amazon.com, book-centric social networks such as LibraryThing include discussions of literature.

Book blogs can come from online communities. Reading challenges, which set a certain number of books to be read on a particular theme in a given amount of time, and read-a-thons, which are specific time periods during which participants read as much as possible. Both types make use of the tools in social networks.

See the article: From Book Clubs to Book Blogs Nancy M. Foasberg. The Journal of Social Media in Society 1(1), Fall 2012

Reference

Sedo, D. R. (2003). Readers in reading groups: An online survey of face-to-face and virtual book clubs. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 9, pp.66- 90.