Using Beanstack for Community Reading Challenges

The Short Part First:

Overall, I felt that Beanstack was visually appealing and included a lot of good components for different types of reading challenges and personalization options. However, the system did not catch on with my campus ELA teachers or a lot of the students, even after significant promotion, and it is missing a couple of pieces that would make it more user-friendly. Ultimately, the high price tag overcomes its appeal.

What I Was Looking For with Beanstack

I wanted to use Beanstack as a system that would be like Goodreads for kids - and I hoped teachers and maybe parents would also participate in schoolwide reading challenges to promote a culture of reading around campus, and make it a really visible part of our school community. I was not looking for something like Accelerated Reader for accountability or points, but a system that would celebrate all the reading happening, and draw more teachers and students in to the process.

I know that for me, using Goodreads is a great tool to see what I've read before, and it helps me know myself better as a reader. I might think I read a lot of fantasy, for example, but when I look back on what I've actually read, I read a lot of realistic fiction. Knowing that can help me think more about how to stretch and try new genres. This list also helps me find new books - I can revisit my "Read" list and remember authors or series or types of books that might help me find my next great read. As a librarian, Goodreads also helps me sort books into categories that's useful for remembering titles to recommend to others for specific purposes, but I know lots of readers like to recommend books to friends, too, so I thought it would be empowering to teach readers to pay a little more attention to their reading lives with an ongoing system.

Before Beanstack

I've used Beanstack with my middle school for almost two years now. Prior to that, I was an elementary librarian and I used a system of Google Forms as a sort of Beanstack tool - especially for our state selected Texas Bluebonnet Battle of the Books program, but also for schoolwide reading challenges.

I love Donalyn Miller's work about the 40 Book Challenge, and I didn't want to curtail what choices students had about what they could read. Previously, as a 5th grade classroom teacher, I used the 40 Book challenge with students and had them create their own Infographics to capture their reading lives. I did a lot of explicit instruction with students around not gaming the system by reading lots of short books to get to 40, but to really pay attention to what they enjoyed reading. Your book was 300 pages? Sure, that counts for two books. You read a fantasy series with 450 page books? Count each one as three books - just read for real, and keep up your independent reading habit.

At my first elementary librarian position, we had a lot of new teachers and a lot of students who didn't have strategies for managing their reading lives. Most students enjoyed reading, but many stuck to the same authors and series week after week. Then COVID came with lots of disruption, and reading was not a regular part of many of my students' lives for a while. When things got to a semi-normal state again, I wanted a schoolwide reading challenge - the idea that everyone reads, and everyone reads self=selected texts, and there's a lot to celebrate in the reading that takes place.

So we set a schoolwide reading goal of X number of books completed, and created a wall visual in the hallway to show our progress. The first year, it was a map of the USA, and since our mascot was a Trailblazer, our horse mascot traveled from our city in Texas to various locations on the map, where one book was equal to a mile traveled. I used real miles to mark distances between funny tourist attractions and included fun facts about the locations in the display, which took a lot of time to manage. So the following year, I created a fictional set of three lands (Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry), where the attractions (Mystery Falls, Biography Bay) were all exactly 100 miles/books apart. This distance was a little too far to see a lot of momentum at first, when we really needed it, but our goal was 3000 books for 2023, so if we had set the distance at 50, it would have involved a lot more locations to create.

The first year: a laminated USA map where we traced miles traveled in terms of books read

Unique roadside attractions with fun facts are labeled on the sides as we "traveled" to them

The second year: The Land of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry, with each location separated by 100 miles traveled/books read. Student adventurers added pictures of their hero selves as they contributed to the journey.

To submit books for the Schoolwide Reading Challenge, students and teachers filled out a short Google Form. Our youngest students (PK-K) had a piece of paper where they could color in a dot for each book they read without naming the books. Participating 1st and 2nd graders could come in to the library to tell me or the library assistant (or their classroom teacher) about books they had read. And 3rd - 5th graders and teachers filled out the form directly - it was simple and asked students for their name, dropdown classroom teacher, book title and author, what the book was about, and what they liked about the book. When I taught students to use the form, I explained that the last part was most interesting - what did they really think when they read it? Some of them struggled to write beyond short phrases like "it was really funny," but others evolved to make claims with supporting evidence over time. I used some of the quotes from this form in digital book advertising on slideshows, announcements, and social media. I also taught students that in the "what is the book about" section, I did want them to tell me something I couldn't tell from just the back cover - so this was a little accountability or proof that the book was truly read. 

Of course, I wasn't with each student all week, so I didn't know for sure if they actually read the book - but Goodreads doesn't know that about its users, either. I really tried to teach students that if the data is fake, it doesn't matter, so the point is not to list a million book titles, but to really have a record of your real reading, and to be able to share book recommendations with each other. We had a significant number of really invested students and staff members participate.

I also realized that for some students, writing - even on a short Google Form - was a barrier to participation, since we had a lot of students who struggle with that, so a tool that used voice to text would have been helpful. We did encourage students (even older ones) to come and talk to library staff or their classroom teachers if they felt like the form was too much for them.

As students completed 10, 25, 50, and 75 books, we recognized them on the morning announcements, and we also used our library button maker to create physical badges for students who reached those milestones. We didn't have a large incentive budget and we didn't want to create a whole bunch of artificial reward blocks for our real readers, but, along with the community wall display of progress, we did want to celebrate that reading was happening.

Overall, I liked the idea of an ongoing, schoolwide reading "challenge" to celebrate reading and make it visible on campus. It was optional, but encouraged through library visits, announcements, the wall display, and in some classrooms where teachers had bought in. It was never too late to start participating throughout the year, and it was understood that in some seasons of the year, your reading life is more active than other times. Since our campus was familiar with Google, Google Forms was accessible for a lot of students, if not visually engaging. And while the data kicked out into an Excel spreadsheet, the way we tracked it was time-consuming (for example, students would enter their names differently on the form sometimes - so Jessica Brown might be Jess B or Jessie Brown or Jessica B - meaning the search and find feature for Jessica's book total (or a given book title) was tricky.

I really wanted students to be able to create to-read lists (another Goodreads feature) alongside their "read" lists, but the Google Forms system didn't really work that way, and it didn't allow students to easily view what they read over time, either. Our library management system had a "list" feature that I tried to teach students to use this way, but it did not show book covers on the student-facing side of books checked out, and of course we didn't have a library of book covers baked into Google Forms, either - and the cover is a really helpful tool for a lot of elementary users. So when I moved to a middle school library and had the opportunity to use Beanstack, I hoped it would be the tool I was looking for.

Middle School Reading Challenge Display: Top Ten Favorites in various categories (landmarks, sports, desserts), with a new one unlocked for every 100 books read and recorded in our school community. I used a Google Form to survey the staff and students about their favorites in 20 categories at the beginning of the school year.

What Beanstack Does

Beanstack is like Goodreads, to a certain extent. It has a collection of book titles and covers in the system so that users can type in books read, and the system often recognizes the title and author and book cover right away (this is less true with more recent books). There is some confusion with new student users about the fact that Beanstack is NOT an eBook platform - the books listed are not available for borrowing, reading, or purchasing - it's only a tool for managing and tracking your reading habits. Some of my less avid readers were confused about the point of it, so I needed to do a lot of instruction around how we pay attention to things we track and measure, and the value of a strong reading life, and how it's empowering to understand your reading habits, just like you might attend to aspects of your health like nutrition and sleep and exercise.

Our district purchased the system and all students were automatically enrolled in Beanstack, which is a computer app located in our district's learning management system portal. Students can track books read, pages read, and minutes read. It is similar to the Google Form I described above, but the user interface is more engaging, and the system already knows the user (no entering name, grade, or homeroom/ELA teacher each time), and the system also often finds the exact book they're trying to log after a few keystrokes, so entering data is shorter on the user end.

Beanstack also offers digital badging, which I really liked - so it was possible for students to "unlock" achievements after they read X number of books or minutes. It offers pre-made reading challenges with header images, achievement levels, and badges already created, or you can personalize the challenges and create your own badges. I used the same template for Beanstack badges as our physical button maker template, so that the challenge completion of the digital badge was the same as the physical badge students earned. A note on that - I have middle school student library aides who designed a couple of different styles of physical badges for minutes read and books read - and we kept them out on the library counter so everyone could see them - it was a good visible encouragement to participate. We also had an in-library slideshow recognizing participants with various minutes read and book totals.

Student-created physical buttons for reading challenges, some of which mirror the digital badges they earn in Beanstack

Beanstack also offers some pre-made challenges with validation, so you can ask students to complete a task and then ask questions to validate they completed it. You have to go in and check the responses to award completion badges for those tasks, though - they aren't automatically given.

Another tool Beanstack has is virtual tickets. So let's say there's a Bingo Challenge, and a student completes one square. They might earn one ticket for each task completed. They can put that ticket in to any digital prize bucket you establish - for a Slinky or a Rubik's Cube, or a Squishmallow, or a gel pen. So a reader who only completes one task might only have one ticket, but they still have a shot at winning an incentive. Students who complete six tasks might have six tickets - all toward the gel pen, or spread out among prize options. This is also true for minutes or books challenges - so students might earn a ticket and a digital badge for reading one hour, digital badge only for reading five hours, a ticket and digital badge for reading 10 hours, and two tickets and a digital badge for reading 20 hours. You can set up tickets and badges at any interval you choose, but it adds another step to load the incentive images and options. Not everyone is good with prizes related to reading, so it's not mandatory to use those tickets at all. Others prefer to use tickets for above and beyond tasks - like submitting book reviews - and you can set up reading challenges that way in Beanstack, too.

There is a tool in Beanstack that flags readers who enter a lot of minutes or books, and you can see a report with "flagged entries" as the administrator. As you get to know your readers, you will see patterns of reading that don't seem realistic and you can have conversations around real data, and you will also see very avid readers who regularly get flagged because they read so much. Beanstack allows you to "verify" certain students so they can enter as much reading as they like without limits. For others, you can set the default limit where a message pops up saying "This seems like a lot of minutes - are you sure?" and an additional limit (3 hours for example) of reading logging per day. For students who only tended to enter reading minutes when they visited the library, this resulted in them wanting to log all their minutes for a month in a single day so they didn't have to enter individual 45-minute reading blocks ten times, for example - so it became a chore if they hadn't kept up with entering data. To me, it didn't seem like a big lift, but for many students, it did seem like an extra task with not a lot of value, even if we had talked about being able to use the data to make their next reading choices or reflect about their reading habits.

Beanstack has a feature where teachers can enter book recommendation lists, and students can friend each other and see what titles they're reading (you can turn this feature off if you prefer), but teachers and students cannot friend each other and share books they've read in the system. I have requested a to-read list feature, but it does not exist yet - and I really wanted that so that when I do book talks, students could create lists with book covers within Beanstack - so their read and to-read lists are housed in the same place. Even if they can't all check out the same book I recommend that day, they can come back for it later if they have it on their to-read lists.

Beanstack also has a lot of reporting data that teachers and program administrators (the librarian) can see, like most popular books read, total minutes, total books, book completion or minutes for each student, badges earned per student, top ten readers for books, minutes, or pages, and more, for any given time period you set.

Drawbacks of Using Beanstack

• The biggest drawback for me is price. Beanstack is really expensive, so even though it saves some time, it's hard to justify the expense. You get a discount if other schools in your district also subscribe to Beanstack, so if not everyone else is on board, the price climbs for your campus.
• I appreciate the option to create my own challenges and personalize the badges students can earn for various reading achievements. However, you can't upload challenge badges within the challenge - the badge uploads are in a separate menu. So you have to plan all your badges and upload them to one part of Beanstack, and then go in to the challenge menu to actually set the challenges up and add the badges in. This adds a lot of steps, particularly when you want to offer frequent badges to motivate readers to participate. I found that if I named each badge image by the number of books or minutes, it helped a lot, but I needed to track carefully to avoid errors, since my badges tended to be in hours and the system "speaks" in minutes.
• I had concerns about cheapening the reading experience by incorporating incentives (if you've read Daniel Pink's Drive and thought about intrinsic and long-term motivation, you may share some of these). I do think the way Beanstack is rolled out on campus makes a big difference - it can be about reading awareness that varies from person to person, and not about competition or points - but if adults aren't careful, I think it could be perceived that way. Leaderboards showing progress in minutes and books show up on the login screen, comparing participating schools within your district. This could motivate some students, but may inspire exaggeration in others. Over-use of tickets and physical incentives might increase fake logging, which is the opposite of the goal. I think it's possible to use this tool in a positive way, if the community is consistent and thoughtful.
• I wish Beanstack had a to-read list feature. This would be a great way for students to see what they've read and manage what they'd like to read in the same space.
• The user interface is visually appealing, but it does require 4 clicks to get to the logging page, where users then select the date, add the title and author, and add either minutes read or pages or mark a book completed. This was not too big a lift for me or for avid readers and writers, but for reluctant readers who weren't regularly tracking until they visited the library for a lesson, it did seem like a lot of work and they wanted to lump all their minutes into one logging session (which is prohibited), instead of clicking on all the individual days they actually read.
• Many of the pre-made challenges had too few minutes or books for my avid readers - they would join a challenge and finish it in three or four days instead of taking a month. This meant that I needed to create more elaborate challenges to meet their needs, and the biggest piece of that work was creating badges. I had some of my student library leaders create them in Canva, but I still needed to plan which minute or book or page intervals would need badges, because the badge image and title need to be part of the design to avoid confusion when entering them into the challenge.
• I just couldn't get a critical mass of campus to participate. As a middle school librarian, my ELA teachers were not hostile or anything - they just had other systems in place and weren't looking to use Beanstack. I promoted it extensively to our staff and parents, and I had a total of about 70% student participation, with about 30 - 35% regular participation. Some teachers reported that it was just a little clunky to use, but I didn't find it cumbersome with regular tracking. I spent the first year really promoting this program, including offering incentives, and ultimately creating a wall display as a reminder (which was the whole thing I was trying to avoid having to manage in the first place). Again, since I'm a librarian, I have a bubble of people around me who read a lot and are invested in attending to their reading lives, so many of my closest friends use apps like Goodreads - but many of my students and some teachers struggled to understand that Beanstack was for paying attention to reading habits, and not an eBook provider. I also had a few avid readers who just couldn't be bothered to record reading in Beanstack; they were perfectly happy with their reading lives the way they were.
  
  

What I Liked about Beanstack

• I appreciate the timely customer service. Whenever I've had questions, the team has responded within 24 hours - usually within three or four - and when appropriate, they send step by step video demonstrations created just for me in the response. They regularly ask for feedback with surveys, and offer tutorials and help articles.
  
• I liked a lot of the existing reading challenge templates, which you can easily copy and offer to your campus community. These include state book award lists, such as Bluebonnets and Lone Stars, seasonal themes, and options for younger and older students.
• When I used tickets with challenges for incentives like slime or gel pens, I liked that low-participant students still had a chance to earn a prize, even if they only earned one total ticket. The ticket set-up is a little cumbersome on the admin side, but the digital drawing and the user side are clean and easy to use. For example, if a user earns 10 tickets and only applies 7 to a given incentive choice, the system clearly shows "you have three tickets left" so a user can apply those.
  
• I liked the gamification for students who are motivated by that. Just like tracking exercise or keeping your language app streak alive, Beanstack (which also celebrates streaks) is motivating to some users to keep reading going.
• Beanstack has an app, and both the phone and computer versions allow users to go into the log minutes menu, click start, and read, and then click stop when they finish, allowing real-time recording instead of estimating.
• I appreciated the huge variety of reports I could pull to see student reading behaviors (but since many students weren't recording reading, I didn't have an accurate set of data about the reading that was really happening on campus). I was able to pull up individual readers, specific grade levels or ELA classes, most-read titles, most-earned badges, lists of readers by minutes or books read for a given time period, specific reading challenge activity, and more.
  
  

Reading Challenges with or without Beanstack

I've used Reading Challenges with experience incentives to encourage reading over breaks (fall, winter, spring), and while it is easier with Beanstack to some extent, it can still be managed with Google Forms or other digital systems. Students who complete X number of reading minutes (usually about 3 or 4 hours a week) are eligible to participate. If they submit their reading by the deadline, I make buttons with our library button maker to serve as their Party Invitation, and email students to stop by the library to pick them up, with information about the experience.

We've done a Crafts and Treats Party, where I get some cookie and chips packages in bulk and serve hot cocoa, and put out some special craft materials we don't typically have out for our usual library stations or Maker Days. These have included glow stick light sabers, rock painting, calligraphy, jewelry making, and seasonal crafts. We also have done a Cookie Decorating Party - I'm fortunate to have a parent who decorates cookies and cakes, and she sets up kits for this and comes in to help support the students. I have a small activity budget to support supplies for these experiences, and PTA helps by either donating or purchasing snacks.

The First Part Last

Again, while Beanstack came close to being the tool I was hoping to find, it didn't work as smoothly as I hoped. It was too expensive to keep when it did not seem to increase reading frequency or engagement among reluctant readers (although it did seem to amplify visibility of some participating readers and their reading habits). I do think it's a tool with a lot of promise and it could be successful in some communities, and more effective with some refinement, but at the current price point, I'll have to choose other methods to support readers as they grow their reading habits.