Ebooks and Audiobooks

The world of Sora has changed A LOT in recent years! OverDrive has been phenomenal with providing users with ways to get multiple copies, concurrent checkout models (which means a title with 100 checkouts that can be used a little at a time or all at once), leasing class sets on demand, and they periodically loan us sets of simultaneous access titles (which means that it's always available, all the time).

If you haven't explored Sora lately, you must do so now. It's the easiest, quickest way to help teachers get "class sets" of what they need for their students. For concurrent checkout titles, we can also help you assign those titles to your students! (All 31 districts in WSWHE have the ability to have titles assigned to students in Sora.)

If your district belongs to WSWHE MultiMedia, talk to Alicia Makenzie. Not only does MultiMedia have a super impressive physical collection, but they now purchase multiple copies of titles in Sora as well that can be assigned to students.

Here are databases your school/district may subscribe to, where you can find ebooks and audiobooks that you can share with entire classes! Talk to your librarian or contact SLS Library Services for more information.

Capstone Interactive eBooks (Goes with PebbleGo)

BookFlix

TrueFlix

ScienceFlix

TumbleBooks

Learning A-Z

World Book eBooks

It's fantastic to have students reading modern, contemporary fiction, of course! If there are classics in your curriculum...The Great Gatsby, Romeo and Juliet...Frankenstein...Mark Twain...Upton Sinclair... and the like, getting access to those is cake, because those titles are in the public domain. Public domain means the title is freely available to do pretty much whatever you wish. WSWHE SLS and your school librarians can easily get access to public domain titles, and help you virtually distribute them to your students.

Here's one place you can look for public domain titles: Project Gutenberg

We also have lots of classics in Sora. Many of them are labeled "Duke Classics", and you can find a bunch of them here: https://soraapp.com/library/wswhe/curated-1055419/page-1 . If there's a public domain title that you don't see in Sora, ask!

If you are open to seeing what else is available where your students can have all access, all the time, we have other ebooks available on other platforms.

Here's a virtual library document we have to show you what else is available as simultaneous access. Click here for our virtual library of ebooks beyond Sora

Just ask SLS (or your school librarian) if you need username/password for these ebooks. Many of the Rosen ebooks are interactive! Those that are not interactive are eventually going to be moved to Sora, but we'll put out notice when that happens.

This is a whole different ballgame. There are so many resources available out there for special needs students. Reach out to WSWHE SLS, and your CSE folks, so that we can help you get what you need. There are many services available to potentially tap into, including Bookshare, The Braille and Talking Book Library, and RBERN, as well as tools built right into many of the applications we already use.

While it may not be possible to get a teacher 57 digital copies of a title for their students, it may be the perfect time to try something a little different. Now's the time to explore more diverse choices and encourage student agency. If you want your students to read My Side of the Mountain or Trumpet of the Swan or Across Five Aprils because you teach that every year, it might be time to expand your horizons a bit and see what other super-cool, diverse titles are out in the world now. :)

There are many titles in the WSWHE SLS consortium collection of Sora that have multiple copies. (See the section of this Smore on Quick Tricks in Sora.) There is also plenty in there if you want to try having students read along a particular theme (like #WeNeedDiverseBooks), or genre, or author. If you normally read The Giver, there are sooo many choices of dystopian fiction that would fit the bill, and it might be fun to compare them!

We are so used to ubiquitous access to whatever we want online that we might not be aware that there are copyright laws to consider. For many of the services we use at home, we pay subscription fees for home use (think Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, to name a few). We have to be aware of the permissions we're being granted when we use these services. Your librarians are here to help you navigate these waters and hopefully get what you need. We're all in this together!

If you have any questions regarding ebooks, audiobooks, or streaming resources, feel free to contact your wonderful librarians at WSWHE BOCES...as well as your school/district librarian!

Karin Howansky, WSWHE BOCES School Library System

Kerrie Burch, Coordinator, WSWHE BOCES School Library System

libraryservices@wswheboces.org

Alicia Makenzie, WSWHE BOCES MultiMedia

amakenzie@wswheboces.org