Librarians Share: Engaging student readers at Somerset College

Editor's Note: This blog post was written by Dianne de Villiers, school librarian at Somerset College in South Africa, to share their marketing plan for this school year. Do you have a story you'd like to share on the OverDrive blog about how to engage readers with your digital collection? Email blogs@overdrive.com with your story.   With the new academic year beginning, we are using this chance to remind our students about OverDrive. We've had t-shirts made with the message "You have devices, we have eBooks.” We will be wearing them for at least a week to help promote our digital collection. Posters are also being put up all over the school. I have been asked to write the headline article for the first school newsletter that will tell our school community all about our eBooks, and I plan to promote OverDrive in our weekly newsletters by highlighting new books we've purchased. Once I've gathered more statistics, I plan to submit an article to the Independent schools magazine. I will also be presenting about OverDrive and our digital titles at one of our regional teach meets. I asked my young “preppies,” who are only 10, to sign on to OverDrive. It was such a simple process and really required no training because the system is so easy to use. After they found the experience so intuitive, I am not concentrating heavily on training, although we are going to go into all the classrooms to demonstrate OverDrive. Our teachers have already logged on and feel comfortable with how everything works. Our English teachers told me they plan to promote eReading in their classrooms. I see my main focus as getting the senior kids to actually start reading! We are hoping that by easily accessing eBooks, they will be inspired to read. While we haven't given up on "dead tree books" completely, we're excited to grow with OverDrive and hope to see continued expansion of titles and features here in South Africa. Dianne de Villers is a school librarian at Somerset College.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OverdrivesDigitalLibraryBlog/~3/fyPzaA7nLRM/