This is a guest post from Annie Allen, Media Specialist at Rogers Middle School. Read more about our Extended Mini Grant Program or fill out one of our applications. This program is only available during the FY21 school year.
I was awarded an $800 CMLE Extended Mini Grant to purchase ebooks for our middle school students. Getting books into the hands of our students has been a challenge during Distance Learning. Students and parents are not able to easily pick up print books at the school, so expanding our ebook collection was a priority. With a limited budget, ebooks have not been something I’ve really been able to expand access to. This mini grant allowed me to purchase 108 new ebooks for our students!
Of these, 81 of the titles ordered were able to be shared across our secondary schools through MackinVIA, the platform we use for our digital content. This means that not only are these books impacting access for my 700 students here at Rogers Middle School, but thousands of students across our district! All of the titles purchased are perpetual ownership, which means our students will be able to enjoy access forever!
Historically, ebook circulation has been low at my middle school. Our students really prefer print books, but with Distance Learning ebooks became some of the only books easily accessible for students. With most of our access being those from the EbooksMN collection, I wanted to purchase some additional titles with strong middle school appeal, specifically fiction novels.
I purchased the new ebooks in late December, and they were ready and available for students when they returned from winter break. I heavily promoted the new books the first two weeks back to school, posting on Schoology, creating featured book content in MackinVIA, and sending out a video for our ELA teachers to show to students. These efforts paid off!
Last year during the same time frame (Jan 1-Jan 31, 2020) there were only 38 total logins to MackinVIA and 0 views and 0 checkouts of ebooks. This year between January 1 and January 31, 2021 there were 1,972 logins to MackinVIA, 1,080 ebook views and 12 ebook checkouts! January 2021 ebook usage exceeded TOTAL usage of ebooks from March 2020-June 2020 when we moved to Distance Learning for the first time (109 ebook views, 2 checkouts)! February has seen continued usage due to I Love to Read Month promotional activities (again featuring the new ebooks) and a virtual book tasting with 6th grade ELA classes. Through February 23rd, there have been 555 views of ebooks and 12 checkouts. This is encouraging since more than 90% of our students are now back in-person 4 days per week.
Having the additional ebooks for our students will be a game changer for the rest of this school year and into the future. Our students who have remained in Distance Learning will continue to have easy access to our expanded ebook collection in addition to those attending school in-person. The titles purchased are newly published, old favorites, or titles in our book club collection which means they will have broad appeal for a while. I am excited to use our ebook collection for a summer reading promotion since our students will have continued access over the summer months!