Reading Logs going digital how to and the benefits of going digital Part I

The TechWizard's Guide to Library Magic

Written by Ms. Cummings

CiTi Library Media Specialist

Reading Logs going digital how to and the benefits of going digital 
Part I

Step 1 - Create a Google Form to collect reading log data

Step 2 - Create the Public Reading Dashboard
Step 3 - create the sections of your dashboard
Step 4 - Create the Teacher Dashboard

This is part I of my journey to bringing a reading log into the digital age.  When my kids were younger they had to do reading logs all through elementary school and without fail they would get lost or have orange juice spilled on them and one even ended up in the bottom of the hamster cage!  Needless to say, they eventually made it to school and the teacher would stamp it and we start the process all over again.   As  School Library Media Specialist working in a K-12 Library I decided I wanted more to come from those reading logs.

My first step was to create a Google Form that provided an easy way for students and parents to enter the information.  I had to decide what data I really wanted to collect.  Your choices will depend on what data you and your teachers want to collect.

My form includes:

1. Automatically collect email address - this makes it easy to restrict access too.
2. First & Last names - with school student email address you may not need this I choose to include it in my data collection
3. Select one - student or adult - I want students to see adults are reading too, but you may not want to include this option
4. Grade - I am K-12 so I did Elementary, Middle School, and High School. Plus adult.  You can choose the grades you are working with.
5. Team - There are some teams in my schools.  Optional question.  
6. Book Title - ALL CAPS - this makes it easier for the system to match up titles.  You can go into the Google Sheet and correct any errors but all caps help limit the need to make corrections.  The program will count a title in all caps as different than the same title but in lower case letters. 
7. Author - at least the last name
8. Genre - I set up options for the genre and included "I can't decide" option.  You can leave this as a short answer but I don't recommend that. for the same reason as the title.  Spelling errors will cause problems so it is easier to have them select from a list
9. Abandoned or Finished - This is important to me in that all reading counts and it tells me that the student didn't like something about the book.  This helps with book recommendations and possibly tell you when a class needs a lesson on picking out just right books.  I will show you how to set it up so only finished books are counted in "Total books read".
10. Rate this book - I put in a 1-5 scale for rating the book.  This will help with the popular author and popular book part of the display
11. What is the next book you would like to read? - This doesn't appear in the display but its data I would like to have.  I have told students that they can put that they don't know what to read next.  This is also an optional question.

I had gotten this far into my creation of the Digital Reading Log and honestly, I did not really know where to go from this point.  I attended a PD on young adult books and the presenter mentioned a reading dashboard.  I got the links and viewed what they had created.  This is the link to the YouTube video Creating a Digital Independent Reading Log with G Suite Apps https://youtu.be/ASHSGiyCE68

There is also an article about the reading dashboard at this link

Honestly viewing the video and article did help get me to move forward with reading dashboard but there was so much that I struggled to figure out.

This is a lot of information to collect and you don't have to have all these items, but this data collection will provide the data for 2 to 3 dashboards.  The first and primary one is the Public Reading Dashboard.  Secondly, there is the Teacher Reading Dashboard and last, there is the Student Dashboard.  The Student Dashboard I am still working on and I will add a post for that one when I have it working.

Go ahead and create your own Google Form Reading Log and the Google Sheet to collect the data.  The sheet is created by clicking on the green box on the RESPONSES tab of the Google Form you created.  You will need this for the next part of this project.  Having the finalized form before you start the next step will be helpful, but there is a way to manage if a need to edit the Google Form occurs.  I will include tips to help you deal with those issues in the next posts.

Part II