Brown University’s Study:
Evaluating the Effectiveness of BookNook
BY BEN KOSHLAND // MARCH 12, 2019
The NAEP reading data are a wakeup call: we need to change how we think about scale
It’s become an all-too-familiar tradition: every fall of an odd-numbered year the federal government releases the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP, also called ‘the Nation’s Report Card) showing little to no improvement in reading and math proficiency....
Lessons from adopting a new Curriculum
Curriculum adoption is one of the most important processes that a School District goes through. The process is lengthy, costly and does not happen often, yet it directly affects the teaching and learning of everyone in the District. While it is mandated by...
Why Technology Doesn’t get Implemented (And What To Do About it)
Recently there was an article that was passed around at BookNook about the Six Unforgivable Sins of Teacher Professional Development. One stood out to me - Trying to Flash Credentials You Don’t Really Have - basically saying “I was a teacher too.” The reason it stood...
RELEASE: BookNook and Young Authors Publishing announce new partnership to get diverse content in the hands of thousands of students
OKLAND, Calif. and ATLANTA, Ga. -- Young Authors Publishing and BookNook, organizations focused on furthering the potential of students across the United States today announced a new partnership that will allow stories written by diverse young authors to be...
Diversifying the Literary Canon of Children’s Books
There’s a constant need to address diversity in literature, specifically in children’s books. During their most impressionable years, it’s important that children are able to see reflections of themselves throughout their environments, which, when taking a holistic...
BookNook Wins MIT Competition for Digital Research in Education
We are thrilled to share that the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has selected BookNook for its second round of groundbreaking social science research projects. The full press announcement is here. With...
University study shows BookNook students make significant improvements!
The study. Last fall we engaged Dr. Jing Liu, Ph. D, a Postdoctoral Research Associate, at the Brown University School of Education to complete an independent study on the effectiveness of BookNook used with students at five of our partner elementary schools. When we...
Fighting The Opportunity Gap: What Schools Can Do To Close It
Fighting the Opportunity Gap Scroll to read post What is the Opportunity Gap? The term “opportunity gap” refers to any significant and persistent differences in academic performance between different groups of students. Groups are based on...
Creating a Literacy-Rich Environment
Creating a Literacy-Rich Environment By Samantha Burke Facebook Twitter Instagram Linkedin About the author: Samantha Burke is a credentialed reading specialist that has worked with children in the San Francisco Bay Area for ten years. She enjoys creating innovative...
Engage your K-5 Students with These 5 Reading Tips
Engaging students in meaningful conversations about what they are reading is so important in helping students get the most out of instructional time. Getting students engaged in reading and talking about what they are reading will encourage them to develop deeper...
5 Ways to Improve your Students’ Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is how students process, connect and learn from what they read. To attain strong reading comprehension, students must be a active readers. This means students are not just just decoding words, they are actively thinking about the content...
16 Great Back to School Books to Read With Your Students
What books will you read your first week back? The first books you read with your students give you the opportunity to discuss all those “Back to School” feelings and set the tone for the learning environment you want to create with them this school year....
A Day in the Life of a BookNook Reading Guide
I want to live a day in the life of a Reading Guide... That’s what I found myself countlessly saying when I started my PeopleOps journey at BookNook. I heard great things about our application that was created to support children’s reading. I was shown how it...
BookNook Spurs Parent Volunteer Program, Produces Great Results
About 10 miles south of the Wisconsin/Illinois border, Carrie Modra is hard at work with her students. As a Woodland School District 50 educator for 8 years in her role as a Speech-Language Pathologist, Carrie is an integral part of the daily ins and outs of the...
Technology in Education: Overcoming Barriers to Success
This post is the second part in a series we are doing on Barriers and lessons learned on implementing Technology in Education. Check out part one here. Overcoming Barriers: Emerging New Best Practices As daunting as the barriers may seem, current EdTech research is...
Announcing A New Funding Round—And More Importantly What We’ve Learned
About a year ago, we announced BookNook’s first fundraising round. A group of dual-bottom line investors, led by Reach Capital, bet on a company with a very rough alpha product, a handful of pilot schools, and a vision that technology could be used to make engaged,...
3 Things the Nation’s Report Card Is Telling Us About Reading, and 1 It’s Not
This week, the US Department of Education today released the 2017 results of its National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) better known as the Nation’s Report Card. In what has become a grim ritual for the past 10 years, the numbers show no meaningful...
Technology in Education: Barriers to Success
Back in 1986, Ohio educator and school administrator Howard Merriman bemoaned "the challenges brought by the incursion of technology into the schools." He was talking about electric typewriters and programmable televisions, but 40 years later, the problem for schools...
Guiding Your Student to Success: Effectively Using Talking Points and Discussion Questions
This is the 1st post in our new series: “Guide your Students to Success” that will explain how to best use the instructional components within BookNook. Asking questions that will lead your students to higher levels of comprehension and being more critical learners is...
The BookNook Olympics
These past few weeks at BookNook HQ in Oakland, we’ve been in the midst of our own Olympics. And no, we’re not talking about the March Reading Madness we’re working on with all of the schools using BookNook. We’ve been working hard with Olympic athlete, Kristi...
Gold Medalist Kristi Yamaguchi to be Featured Author for BookNook
OAKLAND, Calif., February 28, 2018 -- Today Olympic Gold Medalist, Children's author, and philanthropist Kristi Yamaguchi announced that she will serve as a featured author on BookNook, a new technology platform that helps children overcome difficulties in learning to...
5 Creative Uses of Technology in the Classroom
Considering the pervasiveness of smartphones, the concept of "technology in the classroom" isn't without controversy. The jury is still out on whether or not kids should be allowed to or even encouraged to bring their phones to class. However, research does indicate...