OverDrive Title Request Spreadsheet

Summer Read 2019

The biggest, bestest summer read yet. 10 weeks, 30 books, and simultaneous check out!

OverDrive Summer Read is an annual program for schools in the US and Canada designed to encourage your students to keep reading all year long. This year’s 10-week program, running June 6 – August 15, is our longest ever. We’re also offering more titles than ever before. Thirty free and simultaneous use juvenile and young adult ebooks (and select audiobook and Read-Along options) will be available to students in participating schools. These titles will be prominently displayed in Sora so it’s easy for students to find their next book and chill out and read.

If your students read them all, they can always check out more books from their public library without ever leaving Sora.

Marketing materials is in the Teacher Librarians Resources team drive.

Ebooks with Audio - all levels

Woohoo! We now have a curated collection of 210 (145 new) ebooks with the Read-Along feature. This collection contains Elementary, Middle, and High School interest/level books. The text is highlighted as it is read aloud. Primary books are a word at a time, higher levels are a sentence at a time. Readers can adjust the speed of the reading by clicking on the menu in the top right of the page. As always, words and phrases can be highlighted, defined, or referenced in online notes.

If you have students needing a little extra to help them read, this is the collection for them.

I've added the eBooks with Audio collection to the main Sora Explore page along with a couple of others:

1. Women's History Month
2. eBook with audio
3. Rolling on the Floor Laughing (I put this up a couple weeks ago and titles are FLYING off the virtual shelf)
4. Professional Book Nerds author interviews - a podcast by OverDrive employees who interview popular authors. Worth a listen!

Also, did you notice those links take you directly to a collection? You can do this to when advertising to your students and staff. You can even link directly to a book! What a great way to make choosing a book easy for the timid. Simply copy the url once you are in a collection or browsing on a book and paste it into your communication.

Sora's "Add to List" feature

She’s making a list, she’s checking it…incessantly: using the “Add to list” feature in Sora

Posted on: Thursday 06 December 2018 — 13:17

By: Sydney Kalnay, Training Specialist, OverDrive.

My TBR list is reaching critical mass. Stacks upon stacks of books fill up the rooms in my house and my animals have even started using them as perches and as stepping stones to get to the windowsills.

Offline, I have no real categorization system. Recommended nonfiction snuggles with my new YA romance books, and my graphic novels bully the classic lit right off the shelves. I often wish I had a way to keep everything in order so I could track what I have read, what I will read, and what’s so overdue to be read that I’ve stopped attending book clubs rather than admit I can’t remember what’s up next.

Online, my book life reads very differently since I started using the “Add to list” feature in Sora to keep track of my titles.

Organize your reads with Add to List

Right now, I tend to use the built-in “thumbs up” emoji for books I have read and enjoyed, and “thumbs down” for titles I wish I had skipped. The “Wish list” category keeps my to-be-read pile broadly in order, but I also added custom “Book Club,” “Fiction,” and “Nonfiction” sub-categories so I always know what to reach for next. Additionally, I can quickly find my all-time favorite genre, “YA” by looking for that custom tag and, occasionally, an added heart emoji I use for pre-order books whose releases I am most eagerly anticipating. I love that I can add as many tags as I need to find what my ever-changing moods dictate as my next great read.

I admit that my organization system is neither complex nor particularly clever. I have seen schools whose students use a variety of fun emoji, words, and even inside jokes and memes to ensure they keep their pleasure reading titles separate from their required books and to categorize their read and to-read lists in a way that makes perfect sense to them, even if it reads like gibberish to an outsider like me.

So, how do I use the “Add to list” feature to keep track of my titles?

In Sora, on the title details page for a book, I tap “Add to list” to pick from a built-in category, to create a new category, or to choose from a custom category I created in the past.

Curated PD collections

in Teachers' Lounge

Check it out! The PD titles have been curated into subject area collections for easier book shopping. Feel free to suggest more titles to fill out our collections.

Summer Reading Program

Free Simultaneous Use Titles!

OverDrive Summer Read Returns in 2018!

Posted on: Tuesday 24 April 2018 — 11:10

By: Christina Samek, Outreach Specialist.

We are excited to announce the return of the annual OverDrive Summer Read program, designed to encourage your students to keep reading all year long. This year’s program will run June 6th-July 18th and will feature 4 Juvenile and 4 Young Adult titles that will be showcased at your OverDrive website for simultaneous, always available access. Boredom is not an option this summer!

This year’s title selection will appeal to all kinds of readers, boys and girls alike. The Juvenile set, intended for your youngest readers, features everyone’s favorite sponge that lives in pineapple under the sea, a young Airbender named Aang, a quirky 11- year-old battling internal demons on a quest to cure himself and bring his family back together, and a comic book hero and world class spy on a mission to collect a deadly weapon and save a city. The Young Adult set, perfect for middle and high school students, includes a mysterious girl who finds a tree that bears fruit born of whispered lies but when eaten reveals a hidden truth, a 16-year-old trying to get into college while simultaneously battling hell spawn that have descended on her sleepy town, a mysterious camp hidden deep in the mountains that may or may not actually exist, and a mother who vanished from the face of the earth. We can’t wait for you to dive into their stories!

To learn more about the program and to find marketing materials to support OverDrive Summer Read promotion (including activity guides, print pieces, communication templates, digital graphics and a special edition podcast from THE Professional Book Nerds), visit: https://resources.overdrive.com/summer-read/.

Questions? Reach out to Library Services or Noel Fenton at OverDrive.

OverDrive Spring '18 Order

The OverDrive Spring '18 Order will be placed at the end of the day, Friday, April 27. Please review the appropriate spreadsheet and ensure your initials are next to any titles you would like added to the consortium collection. If you would like to request a title that is not already in the spreadsheet, add it and alert your fellow librarians to give them the opportunity to add their initials. Titles with the highest number of votes will be purchased up to the budgeted amount.

Elementary Spring Order

Middle Spring Order

High Spring Order

If you are interested in taking a look at the slide deck from our end of year meeting, click here.

March Summary

What is the circulation activity of my school?

OverDrive Teacher's Lounge

OverDrive's Teachers' Lounge features professional learning resources in eBook and audio book formats. Both the Teacher's Lounge collection as well as the student collection of titles is accessible by every BVSD educator, regardless if your school participates in the OverDrive Consortium or not. The professional learning collection is a timely, relevant, and growing so, please make staff are aware of this resource and show them how to access ebooks and audio books , anytime, anywhere.

Teacher's Lounge titles are also searchable from Insignia! Titles in the student collection can be located and checked out directly from BVSD OverDrive, click here to search and see all student titles.

Click here to watch How to Access BVSD Teacher's Lounge video and please pass along to staff.

If you would like to request a professional learning title be added to the Teacher's Lounge please contact Professional Services and we will work with them to locate and add the title to the collection

January Highlights

2017-18 SY represents year 2 for OverDrive in BVSD. OverDrive has compiled a detailed usage report that details Consortium wide usage and checkout patterns , click here to access. The trends are very positive, exactly what we would expect to see as this digital resource enters year 2 of availability. All Consortium members should review this report and consider promotion and collection development next steps.

Remember, if you need ideas on how to market OverDrive please access the Kickin' Into OverDrive series of webinars customized for BVSD:

• LIVE - Monday, 2.26.18 | How to Talk to Your School Community About OverDrive
• Ideas for Promoting Your Digital Collection (Recording)
• Creating Reading Happiness! (Recording)

December Highlights

November Highlights

Did you know...?

You can order titles based on your students' recommendations! On OverDrive Marketplace, go to Insights>Reports, then select Recommendations.

Run a new report, select your school, click Update and see what your students want.

Then let me know which titles to order using the OD Title Request Sheet.

October Highlights

Summer Activity Reports

The graphs below are easily found on OverDrive Marketplace> Insights.

(900) The supplied credential is invalid

If you get this error message when logging in to OverDrive, this has two likely causes:

• Student/staff is using their email address as their Username. @bvsd.org is NOT part of the Username for OverDrive.
• Google passwords being out of sync. Please try having the student/staff go to Password Manager, change their password, then wait a few minutes before trying to login with the new password.

If neither of these solutions works, feel free to contact Rae to trouble shoot. Be sure to include the student name so I can track down the specific problem.

Feb. Updates

• Rae and I just concluded watching an incredibly useful webinar from OD marketing specialist, How to Talk to Your School Community About OverDrive. This 30 minute session is a step-by-step how-to for marketing your OD collection to staff, students, and parents.

Step 1: Watch the playback of this session.

Step 2: Make a copy of this slide show and customize for your purposes and present to students and teachers, and parents. There are worksheets and tutorials for users to access as you demonstrate all the amazing assistive features within the ebooks . Good stuff!

• Would you like us to curate a special collection of titles to support specific units of study? We can do that! Let us know what units you have coming up and we can curate titles in the OD collection that align and support those units. You can then point students to these curated collections so they can quickly access relevant titles.

For example:

• Elementary biographies
• Middle level health and fitness
• Historical Fiction
• Narrative Nonfiction

Keep recurring projects in mind when ordering OD titles this spring and look for titles that will support units, lessons, and curriculum at your school. If you need help with title selection you can always reach out to Jessica Sutton (216.573.6886 x283) OD Collection Development Specialist. Jessica is happy to assist you with locating titles and or compiling a list of suggestions for you.

There is still money in the pot to be spent!

For your reading pleasure

If you aren't already part of the facebook group Future Ready Librarians, it's a great, fast moving resource of savvy librarians. Yesterday someone posted this great article for making a digital shift in THE Journal: Making the Digital Shift? Your Greatest Asset May Already Be in your Building! School librarians are well versed in the evaluation of online, print and digital resources... If you are on the edge deciding about joining, or having trouble getting staff to get