Book Wizard is a free service offered by scholastic. It can be accessed through their website: http://www.scholastic.com/bookwizard/or through Book Wizard Mobile, a downloadable application available for the Ipad, iPhone, and Android devices.
Book Wizard provides a way to access Scholastic’s database of information on over 50,000 children’s books. Teachers and students can either enter a title, author, or keyword when using the website, or scan the barcode with a device such as an iPhone or iPad through the mobile app. The books are not limited to those published by Scholastic, though in my experience using Book Wizard, it seems the vast majority of the books are those published by Scholastic.
Both the mobile app and the website provide
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In a district such as mine, with many older books in the classroom collections, this is a problem.
Another weakness is in the incomplete book leveling often provided. There are two common problems in the book leveling results. First, not all the books are leveled for each system. Some will, for example, display the Lexile, but not the Guided Reading level. This may necessitate the teacher doing further research to find an accurate chart containing the equivalencies in each leveling system. The chart provided by Scholastic is not comprehensive enough to find the equivalency in each leveled reading program.
In addition, Scholastic states, " These leveled reading programs were created and carefully leveled by Dr. Gay Su Pinnell, America's leading authority on guided reading." I have found the levels on the Book Wizard do not always align to the levels found on the official Fountas and Pinnell list of leveled books. Some of the discrepancies are in the range of 4 levels. This becomes confusing to teachers trying to level or fill in gaps in a collection. Guided Reading and Fountas and Pinnell are not one in the same. Therefore, even though Scholastic credits Pinnell for leveling the books, it seems that the official Fountas and Pinnell levels are not the levels found in the Book Wizard database. This has been especially frustrating to me, as my district directs all of classroom libraries must be leveled using the Guided Reading