Empower kids to find “just right” books with MoxieReader

Promoting independent reading in the classroom can be a lot of work, especially when it’s time to track your students’ progress. Reading logs are often just meaningless busy work for kids, but meeting individually with kids to discuss their independent reading and setting individual goals can be prohibitively time-consuming.

What if you could have students’ reading targets automatically set up; easily generate a list of “just right” books that are aligned with students’ individual interests; and get rid of reading logs at the same time?

That’s exactly what MoxieReader is designed to help you do.

MoxieReader is a platform designed to promote independent student reading through personalized reading recommendations. It helps teachers save time by providing tracking and accountability tools. I’ll walk you through these various benefits and show you how to get started here.

How MoxieReader encourages students to read more

There are 3 main ways MoxieReader will get your students excited to read:

1. It creates a team-based game for students complete. There are reading goals and fun activities to propel students’ reading progress forward.
2. It provides a social space where students can share book ratings and reviews. One of the most powerful ways to inspire kids to read is to provide spaces for them to share their opinions, find out what their friends are reading, and have conversations about books. All of those processes are streamlined with MoxieReader.
3. It provides highly personalized reading recommendations based on books students have read in the past and how well they’ve read them. This means students are hearing about books that are similar to those they’ve already enjoyed (similar to how Amazon recommends other book titles based on past purchases), AND it means those books are likely to be at a comfortable level of difficulty for the student.

How students are empowered to work toward reading goals

MoxieReader is data-driven, so its book recommendations are never far off the mark when it comes to students’ reading levels and interests. Its algorithm sets realistic and clear goals for how many books a student should read in order to reach proficiency at his or her level.

Think of MoxieReader as the fitness tracker for reading: it tracks students’ reading habits and progress as they use the app, and creates new goals as higher levels are reached.

Another great thing about their recommendation system is that it doesn’t take away students’ freedom to choose books THEY want to read. MoxieReader suggests a collection of books that are a good fit, but ultimately, students take their pick!

How MoxieReader helps you track student progress 

You’ll start with the basic process of signing up, logging in, adding students to the system (through a simple class list upload), and designating your reading groups. You will then be able to monitor the entire class’ progress through your Dashboard. (If you want to get a feel for how MoxieReader works before inputting your own class info, use the demo class option.)

Here in the dashboard, students’ progress can be viewed either as a whole classroom or individually.

The Dashboard has a section called Logs where there is a weekly view of books each student has read previously, books they are currently reading, and a visual chart that gauges progress (or prompts action from the teacher.)

Under Reading Challenges, the teacher gets to see individual reading levels, target reading levels, pages logged, activity points, book points, and reading group performance.

Then there’s the Projections section, which shows student and group progress in visual charts with the added function of easy sharing so that you can show kids their progress.

How students use MoxieReader

Download the Moxiereader app on student devices (it’s available for the iPhone, iPad, and Android.)

Using the app, students will scan the book they are reading (or manually log books they have read in the past) to create a digital reading record. This is how the system begins to monitor their progress and offer book recommendations.

Students can then use the app to participate in discussions and reading challenges with their peers, and share what they are reading. You can learn more in the video below:

How MoxieReader makes reading support easier for teachers

The MoxieReader platform has a massive database of books, which means it likely includes the books that are already in your classroom and in students’ homes. No more searching out obscure titles to try to fit with a reading tool you’re using. MoxieReader works with whatever your students are already reading and the books they have ready access to.

For peer support and fresh ideas for implementing independent reading programs, you can interact with fellow teachers in the MoxieReader Teacher Innovator Facebook group.

You can also access reading reflection activities which help boost comprehension and guide students through their reading journey. These printables can be found in MoxieReader’s Teacher Resource Center. The pages I’ve seen are kid-friendly and attractive, while also focusing on higher-order thinking tasks. Here’s an example:

How much MoxieReader costs

You can see all pricing options here. A 14-day free trial is offered for Teacher Accounts so that you can see if MoxieReader is a really good fit for you and your students. Ready to try it? You can create a demo account for free.

If you like what you see, the regular cost is $63/year. MoxieReader is offering a 40% discount on the annual subscription with the code MOXIE40. That’s around $38 for an entire year’s worth of progress monitoring–an outstanding value, when you consider the amount of time it saves you in collecting and analyzing kids’ reading progress data on your own.

There are also school and district pricing options, so you can see if PTA funds or other school money could be used to cover subscriptions for you and your team.

Disclosure: MoxieReader has compensated me through SyndicateAds for helping them to spread the word about their awesome resources. All opinions in this post are mine, and I only write about products that I would use and recommend to other educators.