General Tips
E-books allow students to take notes, highlight and define what they read. They can even Google unfamiliar terms, a feature I sorely miss when reading regular print materials. Students can annotate books and copy and paste their annotations into a document to share with their teachers. To be most helpful, they should highlight the section for the teacher, and then make their comment. This gives teachers some context for the annotation.
Downloadable audiobooks are another important teaching tool. They can be used in place of or along with the text version. Students can download audiobooks and listen to them offline. They can also adjust the speed and create bookmarks to find their place easily, something difficult to do with books on CD.
Google Translate Chrome Extension and Sora
Please watch the video above to learn how to use Google Translate with Sora. You will find this useful for students learning English as a new language, for Spanish immersion scholars, for bilingual families that want to share reading, or for readers of books in languages difficult to find for sale here in the U.S.
The extension is easy to add to Chrome, and easy to use with Sora titles in English that you have already checked out.
Marketing
Use the downloadable marketing graphics available on the OverDrive website: https://resources.overdrive.com/k-12-schools/marketing-outreach-print-ready. Some of the designs are meant for printing, others for social media. A few can be customized with your own URL or QR code.
Here’s a flyer you can ask teachers to post in their classrooms. Note that you can edit this flyer to direct students to your authentication method.
Assignments
For now, teachers should ask the school library manager for help in making assignments and for looking at reports on the Student Dashboard.
Teachers can also dig in to student reports to see how much time students spend reading their assignments, both during and after school. As long as the teacher has a class or group set up, they can also see how much time students spend reading ebooks, even if they are not assigned. They won’t be able to see which titles (unless they assigned it), but they’ll see how much time.