Have you heard of "social reading"? Generally, reading is something that we do as individuals but it can easily become a social activity. Reading aloud to a class or a small group, sharing our thoughts about a particular book with a friend, participating in a Bookclub - these are all examples of social reading. Increasingly, however, social reading is taking place online via social media and #bookstagram is becoming quite the thing. There are any number of social media bookclubs available, catering to a wide variety of audiences and interests (check out these virtual bookclubs). The advantages of virtual bookclubs are many:
And of course, there's advantages for authors and publishers as well. Essentially, it's free marketing and the more times a particular book or author is mentioned, the more likely it is that social media users will buy that book (according to Kate Hoy from Penguin Random House). As for disadvantages, there is the obvious lack of face-to-face interaction that you have with traditional bookclubs. Given the importance of social media in the lives of our students, online "bookclubs" could provide new ways for us, as teacher librarians, to promote reading in our schools. So how can we do this?
Most of the mentions of online bookclubs that I found relate to adults. And I'm not sure that an online bookclub (in the style of a traditional bookclub - reading a book a month then sharing your thoughts) would be particularly appealing to our students, at least not at my school. But certainly, we could use social media to generate interest in books. Some teacher librarians do this type of thing already with "unboxing" videos. Anyway, these are some of my ideas for using Instagram/Twitter to promote books to my students:
I have not implemented any of these ideas just yet. But this is something I'm certainly going to be looking into doing. I'd love to hear how you are using social media to promote reading in your school. Please share your ideas in the comments.
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AuthorHi, I'm Kelly. I'm a teacher-librarian at a Queensland high school with an interest in the lives of the young people I work with and the issues affecting them. ArchivesCategories
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