I'm "Yapp"ing about #BookBootCamp

The seven South Carolina librarians who are putting together Middle Grade Book Boot Camp are gathering titles and getting our wiki together.  While doing that, I found an app via Librarians on the Fly that can keep all of our participants informed about the schedule, and provide a news feed via a Twitter hashtag. 

Yapp is a free online tool that allows you to create your own mobile app for important events that you want to share.  The design pages are easy to navigate.  Choose from several themes based on the type of activity you are promoting.  The app includes a homepage, invitation page, a page to include a schedule, a newsfeed for following a hashtag, and a gallery for photos that you want to share with the Yapp followers.  You can add extra pages to your app if you need them.  After you finish designing your app, you publish it and share it via a link or QR code.

This is great!  We have a year's worth of Twitter chats coming up, and we wanted to share the dates, the genres, the host for each chat, and the address for the wiki where the book lists are.  The newsfeed via our hashtag #bookbootcamp means that I don't miss any pertinent tweets. 

These are screenshots from my phone.  I downloaded the Yapp viewer, called Yappbox and entered the code of our Book Boot Camp Yapp.  

The schedule page has all of the dates for our chats.  If you click on the arrows pointing right you will see more details, including who is hosting the chat that month, their blog site, and a link to the wiki with a suggested reading list. 

 The News Feed follows your choice of Twitter hashtag. Most of our posts to the #bookbootcamp have been suggestions to each other of books we might want to add to our genre list, or to share a great title or list with other middle school librarians. 




If you need to edit your Yapp after you create it, that's easily done on the website.  When you publish it your followers get a prompt to update to the latest version.

If you want to follow our Middle Grade Book Boot camp via a Yapp, you can click on this link:

http://my.yapp.us/RTMQDS  or you can download the Yappbox app on your smartphone and enter the code: RTMQDS

Of course, the app lends itself really well for major events like weddings, graduations, and family reunions,  but I think it would be great to use it for promoting events in the library.  What about a Yapp for your library events this year?  What would you include?