OverDrive

I learned a lot about OverDrive while shadowing a librarian out in Williamsville last spring. His school district had invested in the program in order to encourage students to continue to read over the summer. Each student is given a free account through the school that they can then access on any device using their school ID and password. It works best on a phone or tablet. Depending on the grade that the student is in, they are allowed to check out a particular number of the digital version of books at a time. In the case of the students I was observing, they were in grades K-4 so the number was 3-5. The app has filters that only allow access to age appropriate materials. There are settings where parents can go in and allow their child access to more advanced materials.

I think this app would work wonders if encorporated into the summer reading program or used to hold a schoolwide contest to see which student could read the most books over break. The app has built in text to speech capabilties for some of the materials which is great for students who have special needs or who have a hard time reading on digital screens. I wish it had blogging or wiki capabilities so that students could leave comments or discuss the books online while they were reading them.