Continuing #classroombookaday During School Closures

Part of the power of #classroombookaday is the way it can work to build community and bring comfort through predictable routines. So what do teachers do when they don’t have a physical classroom for read alouds? During this unprecedented time, many are wanting to turn to online options to record a daily picture book read aloud to continuing sharing this time with their students.

There are many options for creating a digital #classroombookaday grid also: a table in Google Docs or Slides, Google Sites, Padlet, or even Symbaloo with links to your read alouds. Whatever method you choose, make it easy for you to keep up with during this time!

However…

…it’s important to remember that there is an equity issue along with this. What will happen with students who don’t have devices or wifi or data to watch these videos?

…we need to be respectful of copyright laws and honoring the work of the creators who bring these books to us.

For the purposes of this post, I’m focusing on helping with the copyright concerns. The good news is most publishers have extended temporary open permissions during this closure time. It’s important to note that the permissions are coming from publishers, so you need to check the publisher of the book you are considering reading. Please also read the particulars from the publisher as they are all slightly different. Some allow only on closed sites (Google Classroom, Seesaw, Flipgrid, etc. – places where it is password protected), some allow YouTube as long as it is unlisted, some require a permissions statement at the beginning of the video, & some require an email to them. Most require them to be removed by a certain date at the end of this school year. So, yes, you can read most of the books you may want to and share that read aloud via video with your students, but pay careful attention to the permissions statements to honor the copyrights and ensure that these authors can still be writing books when we get further along in this crisis and back in our classrooms.

I was going to create my own table to track these, but this Piktochart that librarian Jessica Purvis shared is amazing, and since she has them all together in an easy to see format, I’m sharing the link to her infographic with some screenshots.