Central Libraries – share resources across your school or district

Lainey FranksCollaboration, News, Online

Promote equity, save teachers time, and improve student learning with Central Libraries.

Every day, we see new and inspiring ways that teachers and students are using Book Creator to improve and deepen student learning. For example, I am hugely impressed by Ms Borden’s Grade 1 students’ Plasticine Stories, and I would love to be a student in their class.

Working with school districts across the world, however, we know that there is a high degree of variability in teacher time, confidence with digital tools, and support from coaches.

This means that from one classroom to the next, some students are highly engaged and getting the most out of their Book Creator experiences, whereas other students haven’t yet had a chance to try it out.

Enter our latest feature update - Central Libraries.

With Central Libraries, schools and districts on a domain license can create, curate and share high quality resources and exemplars with teachers, enabling every student to find their voice and get creative with Book Creator.

How to use Central Libraries

Achieving district goals

Creating equitable learning environments is a priority objective for school districts today, as well as ensuring a consistent implementation of district goals, curricula and frameworks. With Central Libraries, district leaders can easily share district-approved resources with every teacher, ensuring a consistent and high quality implementation.

Many of our customers create curriculum-aligned resources in Book Creator to improve student engagement and access. Take this example of student templates that align with EL Education’s ELA Curriculum, which we developed in partnership with EL Education and some of our school district partners.

We’ve seen similar examples with EL Education’s Skills Blocks, as well as alignment with the likes of Wit & Wisdom and Journeys, and NGSS-aligned science resources. These can now all be put in Central Libraries for easy access and consistent usage.

Make use of your Champions 💪

If you’re a district or school leader, and you’re excited about the potential of leveraging this feature—but like the teachers you support, you’re short on time—don’t worry!

You can enlist the help of any coaches you have, and all the Book Creator Champions and superstars in your district. If you’re not sure who those people are in your district, your Teacher Success Manager can point you towards your most active users, including any official Book Creator Collaborators, Champions and Ambassadors.

Some of our partner school districts, like Milwaukee Public Schools and Smithtown CSD in NY, benefit from innovative technology and literacy coaches who create templates for teachers to use in Book Creator. These books can now be shared right across the district, exponentially improving their impact and value.

Book Creator templates for your use

You can also tap into all the amazing student templates that Book Creator has created and curated, from Getting Started books to ELA Curriculum Resources and Portfolio Templates.

Simply remix your chosen books from the Discover section of the app into your Central Library, and teachers will have access to them directly on their teacher dashboard.

Student templates in Discover

Teachers can save time

Book Creator is incredibly simple to use, enabling any teacher to get great results when they invite students into their libraries. However, there are always some stand out teachers who really take to Book Creator, quickly generating innovative ways to use it, and creating fantastic resources for students.

Enabling these teachers to now share their resources and expertise easily through Central Libraries means that all teachers can work smarter, not harder, saving time while delivering high quality learning experiences.

How to get started with Central Libraries in Book Creator

Your Teacher Success Manager can help you get set up and brainstorm what type of content you may want to include. We often partner with customers to create new content together, so get in touch if this is of interest.

From those customers who have already started planning for this, the types of content they are adding to Central Libraries include:

  • Getting Started resources for different ages and content areas
  • ELA curriculum-aligned student templates to support literacy learning
  • Digital portfolio and science lab templates
  • Student exemplars, separated by age range
  • Training guides and staff manuals
  • Multi-language resources

If you’re a customer but not yet on a domain license, talk to your Teacher Success Manager about upgrading to take advantage of this feature.

If you’re not yet a customer but would like to speak to us, get in touch! We’d love to help you help your teachers create engaging and impactful learning experiences for the students in your district.

I’m a teacher with awesome resources, can I share them with others?

Excellent news! I’m sure your account admin will be excited to get your help - reach out to them to see if you can become a library manager. If you’re not sure who your account admin is, get in touch with us with the contact form below.

Related posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *