best in class school

By: Christina Samek, Marketing Specialist.

OverDrive Education’s team is lucky to work with K-12 partners across the world. Whether it’s answering your content inquiries, helping set up your digital website, providing marketing and outreach assistance, or just talking you through a new process, we enjoy all of our chances to interact with our partners. As the school year wraps up for some of you, we’d like to acknowledge some of the unique, creative, exciting, and fun things you did to encourage your students to love reading as much as we do!

Shout out to Napa Valley Unified School District for their eRead2win summer reading program, which began in 2016 and is continuing into 2017. This program encourages students to read eBooks over the summer with a special “popcorn party” at each school, and also raffle prizes and giveaways. Students can submit book reviews to earn extra entries. NVUSD had great success with this program last summer, increasing their circulation from the prior year and bringing many new users to their digital library.

~Nominated by Melissa Higey, Manager, School Partner Services

Southern Westchester BOCES for consistently thinking of new and creative ideas to promote their digital library. Because of their efforts, during their “Digital Library Week” in February, they saw a 76% increase in circulation over last year.

~Nominated by Karen Jakubczak, Account Specialist, School Partner Services

Washington County School District for the great idea of putting “table talkers” in their libraries. I know I would be staring out the window at the mountains most of the time from this view at Dixie Middle School (left), but there’s no way I would miss these sitting on every table. What a fantastic way to have a physical reminder of their digital collection!

~Nominated by Beau Livengood, Account Specialist, School Partner Services

Alfred-Almond Central School because in May, they had ‘OverDrive Donuts’ with blue frosting with white circle around the hole as part of a promotional effort. Yum!

~Nominated by Alissa Berman, Account Specialist, School Partner Services

North East ISD for their continual digital library success. North East ISD is always innovating and striving to provide more content, raise awareness, increase checkouts, and further engage students and staff.

~Nominated by Karen Jakubczak, Account Specialist, School Partner Services

I would like to nominate Anderson Community School District. The end of the school year is always crazy and hectic but somehow they found time to plan for the next school year. They are planning on bringing OverDrive into their classrooms in a big way. They purchased many Class Sets to use in the classroom and to make it even easier they will be utilizing the Title Assignment feature.  They also took time to sort through their collection to see what they were lacking. The middle school collection now has a great selection of audiobooks! Come August, they will be ready to go.

~Nominated by Jen Sobolewski, Account Specialist, School Partner Services

I’m nominating Scarsdale Middle School. When joining their BOCES digital library, the Scarsdale librarians made “Ask me about OverDrive!” signs and attached them to their shirts. Some students, once becoming “experts” wore them as well.

~Nominated by Andrea Sieracki, Launch Specialist, School Partner Services

Trillium Lakelands District School Board because when it comes to introducing a digital library to a community, Trillium did everything right. They took advantage of our Resource Center’s staff training videos, used the promotional materials to spread awareness, and even ran a very aggressive (and hilarious) Twitter campaign. Within a week of their launch, the district had checked out almost every title in their digital collection! That’s some happy reading if you ask me.

~Nominated by Tiffany Wincek, Account Specialist, School Partner Services

I’m nominating Salem Middle School in North Carolina. A week after going live, Pete, the school’s librarian, informed me that he “had high expectations, but we’ve blown past even those. A third of the collection was checked out in five days and we are approaching 50 holds and 30 recommendations.” In the month of April they had 114 checkouts – and they went live on the 27! In May alone they had 596 checkouts and one day into the month of June they have 20!

~Nominated by Andrea Sieracki, Launch Specialist, School Partner Services

TIE South Dakota Schools are one of the best! They’ve had over 8,000 checkouts since they went live on Jan 30. One of their Learning Specialist, Julie Erickson is great and has been willing to talk to some of my other shared collections about ways to reach success!

~Nominated by Bailey Hotujac, School Content Specialist, Collection Development

Tarkington ISD is helping expose students to digital by keeping a mix of print and digital titles of particular series. Students may pick up the first book in print, but only have access to the second or third book on OverDrive. This familiarizes them with reading digitally when they may have otherwise chosen print. Clever!

~Nominated by Nikka Hronis, Account Specialist, School Partner Services

Emily Swiger from Academy of the Holy Names is using OverDrive to help students PreK-4 have access to Spanish books on their iPads.  She worked with her Spanish teacher to let the students look at books in a self-paced way as they finish their group work.  We set up a simple login specifically for those students and she purchased simple Spanish books for this purpose.

~Nominated by Rebecca Dluback, Account Specialist, School Partner Services