Category: E Books

Tech Column: SORA- Expanding Engagement with eBooks & Audiobooks

2/15/2022

Tricia London is the School Librarian at the Abington Middle/High School Library in Abington, MA.

Are you a librarian at one of the 552 school libraries, who already belong to the Commonwealth Ebook Collection (CEC) and uses the Overdrive app, SORA, developed for schools to access these titles? If so, you may want to just skim this article and skip to the bottom to read the advanced SORA information. There you can learn about assigning simultaneous use titles to classes, taking notes in eBooks, and running insight reports since you already know the basic good news about the CEC and SORA.

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Which Way to OverDrive?: Preparing High School Students for Independent Online Book Access

5/4/2021

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Deborah Kreiser-Francis is the Library Media Specialist at Falls and Community Elementary Schools, in North Attleborough, MA.

Libraries are my (very beloved) second career, and it has been a peripatetic route to get here. To make a convoluted story shorter, with my MLIS I was able to qualify for a provisional Library Media Specialist certificate, but needed to complete a teacher prep program to meet the DESE requirements to move up to my initial LMS K-12 certification.

So, although I have four years working as an elementary LMS, I still needed to enroll in an official School Library Teacher program. I chose Simmons, where I needed to complete a series of courses, in addition to a secondary-level practicum. Lucky for me, Diane McKamy, North Attleborough High School (NAHS) librarian extraordinaire, was willing to take me on as a student teacher this semester.

While reviewing the practicum requirements, I immediately focused on what Simmons calls the Major Project, a unit with a minimum of four lessons. Brainstorming a bit, I considered what would be most practical for our current learning situation. With North Attleborough Public Schools, along with many others, in hybrid or remote learning modes, it made sense to me to figure out how students could still access reading materials, regardless of their location.

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Tech Column: Evaluating Your Ebooks, Why More Tech Isn’t Always the Answer

10/17/2017

5 Comments

Margaret Schoen is a Library Teacher at Newton South High School
and received a 2017 Web Seal of Excellence.

Over the past few years, our team has been evaluating ebook platforms, readership, and purchasing as part of our professional goal. We’ve conducted surveys, run promotions, tested multiple platforms and compared costs. And we’ve come to what might be considered an unexpected conclusion: for our school, and our readers, more tech was not the answer. After all that analysis, we decided to cut back on our ebook platforms to get the most bang for our buck.

There were many steps on our journey. First up was simply to measure awareness. We had ebooks, but did students and faculty know it? For students who were using ebooks, what platforms were they using, what technology? We needed this data to decide how to move forward.

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Reintroducing Printed Books to the Cushing Academy Library

10/15/2016

15 Comments

“Isn't that the library that did away with books?”

Mark Melchior, MLIS, served as Library Director at Cushing Academy from August 2014 to July 2016.

In 2009, the head of school at Cushing Academy announced that the school’s library would remove all its printed materials and become an all-digital library ‘for the 21st century.’ In 2014, I was hired (under new leadership) and asked to rebalance the library’s offerings and restore print resources. The challenge was both intriguing and daunting. The opportunity to build a collection from the ground up was certainly appealing. At the same time, I knew it would not be a fresh start. What might appear at first blush as a straightforward exercise in purchasing and cataloging held a much broader challenge: to rebuild damaged relationships and forge reconciliation among members of the Cushing community surprised, angered and frustrated by the changes that began in 2009. This is an account of my work to restore a print collection and the standing of the library in the school community.

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Exploring E-Books

2/12/2016

4 Comments

Amanda Lawrence is a graduate student at Simmons GSLIS

E-books are meant to have a place in every school library; however, getting them to that place may be a bit challenging at first. And once e-books have found their place, it bears mentioning that their check-out statistics may pale in comparison to their print counterparts. That’s not to say that students aren’t utilizing them, some are, but, in my experience, I’ve found that those students are often the exception and not the rule.

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Tech Column: SORA- Expanding Engagement with eBooks & Audiobooks

Which Way to OverDrive?: Preparing High School Students for Independent Online Book Access

Tech Column: Evaluating Your Ebooks, Why More Tech Isn’t Always the Answer

Reintroducing Printed Books to the Cushing Academy Library

“Isn't that the library that did away with books?”

Exploring E-Books

Forum Newsletter

Co-Editors
Luke Steere and Michelle Fontaine

Categories

Archives

Tech Column: SORA- Expanding Engagement with eBooks & Audiobooks

Which Way to OverDrive?: Preparing High School Students for Independent Online Book Access

Tech Column: Evaluating Your Ebooks, Why More Tech Isn’t Always the Answer

Reintroducing Printed Books to the Cushing Academy Library

“Isn't that the library that did away with books?”

Exploring E-Books

Forum Newsletter

Co-Editors​Luke Steere and Michelle Fontaine

Categories

Archives

Co-Editors
Luke Steere and Michelle Fontaine