Book Club - Online Companion
We have started to use an online companion to our church Book Club.
The instructions below look more complicated than they really are. Please don’t be put off before you try.
Much of what will happen is entirely intuitive, but it looks complicated because I have covered as many eventualities as possible, just in case you do get stuck at some point.
The benefits of having an online home for the Book Club are:
- It provides us with one place to look for past, present and future activities within the club, including dates of meetings and titles scheduled for our reading list.
- It gives space to share ideas, impressions and comments about what we’re reading as we go along, as well as the conclusions we reached as individuals and as a group when we finished a particular title. Hopefully this will serve to keep the club ticking over between the actual meetings.
- It gives a way of being involved in the club and staying connected with other members even if we can’t attend some of the real-life meetings in person.
If these ideas appeal to you, follow the link below.
http://www.my-bookclub.com/bookclub/mcc-manchester/
In order to become a member of the online MCCM bookclub, you will first need to register as a member of the my-bookclub.com web site.
1. Joining my-bookclub.com
1.1 Go to the website shown above and click on the large button ‘Sign up or login to join this club’ and you will arrive at a registration page.
1.2 An easy way to register is to use the option to sign in with your Facebook account. However, if you don’t have a Facebook account, you can simply complete the bottom section of the registration page and tick the various terms and conditions agreements.
1.3 When you click the ‘Register’ button, you will be taken to an ‘Edit your details’ page where you are invited to add extra information to your profile on ’my-bookclub.com’. You do not need to add any further information at this stage if you prefer not to – *except for* the birth month and birth year fields which are mandatory and to which the page will throw you back if you try to move on without entering data in these two fields. You can revisit your profile and add/amend other details at any time via the My Profile button at the top of each page.
1.4 The email preferences in section 4 are ticked by default. You may wish to review these before moving on.
1.5 Just click on the ‘Save details and continue’ button at the bottom of the page when you are ready.
1.6 You will also find that, by now, the system has sent an email to the email address you gave when registering asking you to confirm that you wish to subscribe to the ’my-bookclub.com’ service. Simply click the ‘Yes, subscribe me to this list’ button and the system will respond with an email confirming your userid and key profile information. You can now start joining bookclubs within my-bookclub.com.
2. Joining the MCC Manchester Book Club
2.1 In your web browser, you will now be brought back to the MCCM Book Club page but, as you are now a registered member of my-bookclub.com, there is an option ‘Apply to join this club’ near the top of the page inside the ‘Status…’ box.
2.2 When you click this link, you are taken to a screen with a default message which will be sent to the Club administrator when you click the ‘Send Application’ button. You can amend/add to this message if you wish simply to personalise it a little. A pop-up shows when the application has been sent.
2.3 The administrator will then authorise your request to join the club, you will get an email to this effect, and you will now have full access to the content of the Club’s pages within my-bookclub.com.
3. What you can do when you’ve joined the club
3.1 Calendar - You can see the schedule of events for the Club. By clicking on an event the system gives the book title planned for discussion at that meeting.
3.2 Discussions - You can start discussions on new topics, or by clicking on an existing discussion you can add your own viewpoint to it. The original author of a discussion can choose whether it is visible by anyone in my-bookclub.com or whether it can only be seen by members of our Club. Even if it is visible to all my-bookclub.com users, it can only be added to by members of our particular Club.
3.3 The club’s bookshelf - This serves as the club’s ‘library’ and holds the book details of the titles that the Club has discussed, is presently reading, or plans to read in the future.
3.4 Your profile - This holds information about you as a member of my-bookclub.com and can be useful if you wish to join other clubs or share views within the my-bookclub system.
3.5 Your bookshelf - This serves as your own personal ‘library’ and can contain as many or as few of the books you own as you may choose to include. You can also write reviews for the titles on your bookshelf, and can give star ratings to titles on your own bookshelf or on the bookshelves of any of the clubs you belong to.
3.6 Messaging and Chat - You can send emails from within the system to other members of the Club (the system delivers messages to the email address that each member gave when signing up), and you can use online real-time chat with any members who are signed into the Club at the same time as you are.
3.7 Joining other clubs - The my-bookclub.com system is a comparatively new network but there may be other online bookclubs within my-bookclub.com that you may wish to join. Details of other clubs are accessed via the ‘My Community’ button. Or you could set up your own club for another group or social network to which you belong.
Have fun!
