Introducing Bookship Team for schools and reading groups

Studies have shown that literacy and reading are key predictors to life success [1][2]. But students are awash in digital distractions - YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and the endless noise of the internet. How can we drive reading passion and engagement in competition with that?

At Bookship, we use that device everyone carries around with them - the mobile phone - and the user experiences digital natives expect - to create engagement around reading. With Bookship Team, reading group leaders get the tools they need to engage with, understand and manage their teams.

Bookship is a social reading app for sharing your reading experiences while you are reading, in a native mobile form factor. Post comments, likes and shares to your reading group, right from your phone. Snap a picture of a page that means something to you, right from your phone. Get phone notifications when your colleagues or students post. We’re creating an Instagram or Snapchat model for reading engagement. And reading socially creates that gentle peer pressure that helps readers get through more challenging reading.

Bookship also contains tens of thousands of classic books you can read for free right inside the app - so you can chat about today’s bestsellers if you want, or delve deep into classic books without having to buy them.

The Bookship app is free, so you and your students or colleagues can connect and share thoughts for free. The free Bookship product gives you:

• A mobile chat-style interface for collaboration
• Mobile (& email) notifications when others post
• A free library of thousands of classic books to read right in the app
• The ability to highlight key passages and annotate right inside the book
• A Virtual Highlighter to highlight passages in physical books.

This creates a channel for you to communicate outside normal hours to your students and colleagues.

(Oh - by the way - this all works in browsers and Chromebooks too!)

Today we’re introducing Bookship Team - a low-cost product designed for educators and club organizers who want insight into how people are participating in their groups, and administrative tools to help them manage large or multiple reading groups. Bookship team’s key capabilities:

Team Dashboard

See all your reading groups at a glance, with engagement and user status. See who’s accepted invites, who’s participating (or not), and what % of readers are engaging.

User Analytics

Drill into user-specific reading analytics - for any reader, see how many pages they’ve read and how many comments they have made.

Curated Content

Bookship provides curated content about the book, such as reading guides, author interviews & videos, and background reading about the work.

Administrative Tools

Easily message all your groups right from Bookship. Create reading groups from file, for integration with your school’s LMS and ease administration of large numbers of readers. For example, if your entire school has a one-book program, split up your readers into smaller groups so they can engage effectively.

To get started, just checkout Bookship in your favorite app store, it’s free! Bookship Team is available for a very low monthly subscription. If you’d like to try it out, drop us a note.