Marketing Your Digital Materials

Course

Utilizing Built-in Resources [9:02]

Learn to get involved to provide teachers the tools they need to teach their topics
Learn the importance of being knowledgeable with all digital tools in your library
Learn creative ways to get the information out to students and staff about what is available

These are a few of the things that I found and Barb talked about some of that she actually built these into her presentation. So resource lists, you can create on a certain topic and those will automatically show up on the student homepage. And like we had just said, you can share that either via email or through Google classroom, which is really nice and fluid. Curriculum guides, Barb also mentioned to you. If we are sort of responsible for helping teachers kind of come up with the topics that they are, well, not the topics they're teaching, but the tools in which we are going to try to help them teach the topics they are teaching, Us having access to a curriculum guide that they are using is key and so American history has their own, and if our teachers are using something different, we want to make sure that we get involved in those conversations when those curriculum guides, standards, topics and units are kind of being created. And then videos. There are a variety of videos, both content related as well as kind of study skills or how to utilize certain aspects of the database. So one of my own personal goals, whenever I get a new tool, I always try to become as familiar with it as possible because we know that we then become responsible as librarians to try to pass that information on to our classroom teachers.

So one of the things that I have been able to use the last couple of years is, we talk about nonfiction and print books, and I don't know about you, but my nonfiction print collection is pretty out of date. My library is relatively new, well, new compared to the other two middle schools. I think it was built in 2006. Guess what the normal age of my nonfiction books are? 2006. Like all the encyclopedias were brand new the first year that they were purchased; they're still on the shelves. Some of them got weeded this last spring, which is great, but there's still a lot more there. And most of, like I very slowly refreshed nonfiction because it costs a lot of money and it's really hard to really know what to focus on. So one of the things that I have found as a tool for e-books is Abdo is a company that is very customer friendly and they have multi user ebooks. So this complements anything that I would use with my databases. I would have sort of a two-tiered approach to how I build out like resource lists and the different things that are going to help use the units. And even for genius hour, I actually purchased a set of some titles of books based on kind of student self-selected projects that they did through their Quest class, which is kind of like the GT program that we have in our district. And my seventh grade science teachers actually did genius hour two years, and I got to collaborate with them and it so much fun. And one of the things that they are able to do with their Abdo titles is you can download them with a PDF, so students who do not have connection at home, they can get that on their device and they will have access to it without needing internet once they leave school and you can also share that in the Google Classroom directly.

Something else that one of my good friends, Barb, she I haven't done this yet, but this is she told me about this at the end of the school year. And she actually creates MARC records for all of her digital databases that she uses at her school. So that if a student is searching a certain topic, if there is an entry in one of the databases that they have access to, it will actually show up in a Destiny search, which I think is a genius idea. And I don't know somebody from the SLC side and ABC-CLIO, are you, are we able to get MARC records with our databases? Is that something that is sent? Yes, we do create them, so they are available for all our databases. So if you just upload those into your collection, I had never really thought of that. And I thought that she said she's been doing that for years. And she teaches little. She teaches grades three through five. So I think that this would be a very, very cool way to make what you have available visible and part of every type of every search that your students will do.

Something else that I think is a really easy, easy, fun way is just to create different posters. And I am going to show you, I do virtual bookshelves as well, and this is where this graphic came out of. So if you have a topic you're doing, this is all about civil rights. I was particularly focusing on the sit-in situation at the lunch counters because I have a really great multi-user nonfiction book that I have access to and then I also had the page that is the entry on the ABC American history database. And I wanted something that I could physically print to put by the books that are on the shelf in my print collection, so that if somebody is browsing the shelves in my library, they can see this poster and know that there are digital, there's digital information and resources available to them. And that QR code, again, if they have an iPad—and I have an iPad cart that I keep in my library, that's what we use at my school—within the library, they can take that iPad, and they can go and they can take a picture of it and start sit down and do a little research right there in the library, or they can go back and take it to their classroom depending on what the teacher's having them do. So you can create a quick little graphic like this relatively easy using a few basic creation tools.

This is something, same thing kind of, and again, I haven't done a lot of this with my nonfiction, but when I started to think about this presentation a couple of months ago, I was like, this is so easily transferable to the nonfiction collections. So these are the different graphics that I use for my audio and ebooks that we have at my school. And you could vary and actually this is the template for the poster itself. So you can make a copy of it. You can open that, you can make a copy of it. You can get rid of the Sora logo and put in the ABC-CLIO and the American History, or whatever database you're using, and then you can have it as an ebook and you can put the information you want. And I have a whole file that I just keep adding to the different books that I have been adding to my collection. And then I go around and I put them on the shelf where that information is located. So again, this is the example, I wasn't in at my library for the last three weeks to be able to take a picture of something in my nonfiction collection. But this was one that I have in my fiction part. And it's so easy. So that, again, it's just that idea that I have more information that goes beyond the physical shelf and this is where it is, and this is how you can access it.

And this is an example of that virtual bookshelf. So I don't know if any of you have really done a lot with virtual bookshelves, but I would imagine most of you have since that was really one of the only ways for many, many months, we could really get stuff and information to our students from a distance. So this one is just very basic, but you could really build it out to make it much more interactive. And really, that's where the curation part comes from. You're not creating these original materials as far as marketing goes, but you are pulling together the information you know is available and you're doing a little bit of the work for the teachers, as both a model of this is what then they can do to help their students go beyond Google and make it a little bit of a scaffold where it's kind of like that gradual release of responsibility. Giving them this example can then help them see the potential in, because we talked about with both Barb, a little bit, and then definitely, Elizabeth, teachers just get really nervous about the process and they get overwhelmed and they want to make sure that they kind of know what's happening all the time with when students are starting to research and this is one kind of scaffold that we can help with teachers, that if we help them generate these resources, a little bit before so students aren't just wide open researching, this can kind of get them a little bit more comfortable. And eventually I would have students create these about the topics that they are researching and putting the resources that they have found within those databases and those ebooks, have have them curate a list.

Creating Interest in Digital Resources

Your students are trained to look for the book on the shelf that holds the information they need. But do they think about an ebook? Does searching a database for the information cross their mind?

RESOURCES:

Course Packet

Digital Book Poster template, http://bit.ly/DigitalBookPoster

REFLECT & PRACTICE:

In this lesson, Melissa Thom talks about sparking interest in your library's digital resources by using different marketing tools around your library and your school. Using the poster template that Melissa created (found in the Resources above), design a poster for an ebook or database that you know your students will get excited about. Then use page 4 of the Course Packet in the Resources above to think about 1-2 topics currently being researched in your school and the digital resources you have that would enhance students' learning—how can you market these to get their attention? Do you know of a big research unit coming in the next few months? Create a marketing plan ahead of time and get them interested early!

MLA Citation

Thom, Melissa. "Marketing Your Digital Materials: Creating Interest in Digital Resources." School Library Connection, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267076?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903.

Entry ID: 2267737

Additional Resources

Bibliography.

About the Author

Melissa Thom, MA, (she/her) is a teacher librarian at Bristow Middle School in West Hartford, CT. She spent 12 years teaching grades four to six as a classroom teacher, and eight years ago she earned her library media specialist certification. She is the president of the Connecticut Association of School Librarians, a 2019 AASL Social Media Superstar Reader Leader finalist, and a 2022 Library Journal Mover and Shaker.

MLA Citation

Thom, Melissa. "Marketing Your Digital Materials. Utilizing Built-in Resources [9:02]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267076?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903.

View all citation styles

https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267076?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903

Entry ID: 2267076