eBooks Special Edition
January, 2017
Did you know eBooks are available for elementary students?!
Top Users!
- Amesse
- Bradley
- Gust
- Holm
- Fairmont
- Farrell B. Howell
- Goldrick
Overdrive eBooks
Starting this fall, we rolled out content for elementary students. This included eBooks, audiobooks and Readalongs (books you can read and listen to at the same time). Overdrive eBooks can be accessed from any device! It is a browser-based reader, there are apps available but you do not need to use them to access content. Just go to www.dpsk12.lib.overdrive.com Students can download books for reading offline, even in chromebooks. Teachers and students can make recommendations for additional eBooks to purchase!
We will begin to make Middle School content available in February, 2017 and high school titles in August of 2017. Regardless of content roll out, any teacher or student in DPS can use Overdrive immediately.
Overdrive has a very robust help section. Check it out after you log in!
There are two ways to access our Overdrive eBooks:
- go to dpsk12.lib.overdrive.com
- go to your school's LION web page and click on ebooks, then click on "Overdrive. All LION school pages are listed here: http://lion.dpsk12.org/screens/schoollist.html
Logging into Overdrive
- Staff use their district ID and password
- Students use their student ID as their username and their birthdate as their password (2 digits for day, 2 digits for month, 4 digits for year)
Follett eBooks
There are two ways to access our Follett Shelf eBooks:
- go to your school's LION web page and click on ebooks, then click on "Follett". All LION school pages are listed here: http://lion.dpsk12.org/screens/schoollist.html
- go to gofollett.com, select Colorado, then your school (it will autofill as you type)
Logging into Follett
- use your student or staff ID as BOTH the username and password
Tumblebooks
- Go to http://lion.dpsk12.org/search/f and you will see Tumblebooks under popular databases.
- You can also go to your school's LION site, click on "eBooks" on the right-hand side, and then Tumblebooks.
Will print books no longer be relevant?
Reading online also places a higher cognitive demand on the reader, which results in lower comprehension. Students also often report being more easily distracted while reading online. This tells us we need to provide a balance of different formats.
In addition, having print picture books is extremely important to early literacy. Mobile devices do not have screens large enough to match the picture book spreads of the print versions which allow for an adult to share the reading experience with a small child in a way that includes incorporating the small details of an illustration. Children under the age of 8 are concrete learners and benefit from many of the affordances of print books.
So why purchase eBooks? Access, access, access! Some neighboring school districts have experienced extremely high usage of eBooks, across all demographics. Students can now have access to a rich selection of books in their own home. One of the best/worst moments of the student eBook testing was when students were trying to take the password cards home for the demo accounts. They wanted to keep reading! This was exciting. The worst part was having to tell them the demo accounts would close and they would have to wait for content. We also enjoyed hearing some students say they were relieved they wouldn't have to worry about losing books anymore:)
We know our students must take digital assessments and its critical we allow them to experience digital texts and annotation tools.
We also know that we have students at each grade level reading at a variety of grade levels in a number of different languages. Ebooks will allow us to leverage books across buildings, for example, our middle school students will be able to access content purchased for elementary school and high school (if it is developmentally appropriate). Finally, eBooks allow students to read books that are below grade level without any peers having to see the cover or the length/difficulty of the book.