Forget a selfie, try a shelfie! When I scroll through my Twitter feed I love seeing shelfies posted by the people I follow. A shelfie is snapshot of someone holding a favorite book or sharing the books sitting on their bookshelf. This concept can be integrated into a variety of reading activities including shelfie book recommendations.
Digital tools make it easy to capture images and record voice from just about anywhere. Whether your students use the camera on their iPad or the webcam in their Chromebook, kids can snap pictures of their favorite books to share book recommendations with authentic audiences. Here are a few ways you can take your shelfies to the next level to share favorite texts.
Shelfie Book Recommendations
- Kids can make their shelfie talk by snapping a picture of their favorite book and opening the image in an app like ChatterPix Kids. ChatterPix Kids lets students slice a mouth across any image and record their voice to create a talking movie.
- Ask students to snap their shelfies and compile a collection of their pictures in an app like Spark Video. They can record their voice over their image recommending a favorite book. Spark Video lets you create a compilation of slides to make a class movie of favorite books.
- Students can use an app like Explain Everything to import their pictures and add captions to shelfies. This is a great way to have kids annotate an image and use text (or audio) to record their recommendation.
- Turn shelfie images into augmented reality triggers using an app like Aurasma. Students can scan the shelfie augmented reality trigger to watch a video pop up that tells them more about the setting or author of a book.
- Create shelfie posters and add a QR code to take interested readers to information on where they can find the book in the school library. A QR code could also connect users to an audio book recommendation.
Have you used shelfies in your classroom? Share your experience below!
