Wide Array of e-Books Now Available to Hicksville Students
A new partnership between the Hicksville Public Schools and the Hicksville Public Library has been launched. This collaboration will be a welcome resource for our students to easily access books electronically through the use of electronic library cards that will give them the ability to borrow books and use resources from the Hicksville Public Library, as well as all of the public libraries in Nassau County. In addition, students will also be able to borrow books from the over 300 e-books that are part of the Hicksville Public School District’s collection of e-books.
In all elementary schools, the school librarian will distribute an electronic library card, an e-card, with a unique ID number for each student. School librarians in all elementary schools will be providing lessons to all classes, in all grades, on how students can use his/her e-card to borrow books through the Hicksville Public Library. These lessons already began in all grade 5 classes during the week of January 11-15, and will be followed by lessons in all K-4 classes during the week of January 19-22. Once completed, students will be able to borrow books from the Hicksville Public Library, as well as our Hicksville Public School District collection of over 300 Juvenile e-books. For students who attend school remotely, his/her e-card information has been mailed to homes.
Our librarians are excited to offer this opportunity to students. The feedback from our librarians and students has been overwhelmingly positive. As of this date, students in the elementary schools have borrowed 257 books from our District's collection of e-books as well as from the Hicksville Public Library. In addition, middle school students have borrowed 160 books. The enthusiasm of students has been noteworthy with librarians reporting as follows:
"The students at Lee Avenue are really excited that they will be able to check out e-books and utilize the Hicksville Public Library from their devices." - Lee Avenue
"Many of the students were excited to know that they could use this outside of school hours." - Woodland
"I introduced ‘Sora’ to our fifth graders, and they were immediately engaged and excited to discover new titles to read independently. They were instantly able to navigate the app to successfully search for and borrow books - some students even placed titles "on hold" and are eager to begin their next new "read." The following day, I was elated to discover that many of the students were reading independently on their Chromebooks during their indoor recess time." - Jen Coady, Librarian at Dutch Lane.
From three students at Dutch:
"Sora is very good, I really like that we get to take out books because we can't do it in our regular school library since it's a classroom this year. I like the books and I get to take out a couple at a time and I can search any book I want. I can even go on it after school hours. Sora lets us read any time we want - it is also very easy to learn how to use it."
"It is a good website, it has almost all the books you can imagine. I recommend it. It also has all sorts of non-fiction books about history and it has a bunch of fiction books like one of my favorites- the ''Dog Man'' series."
"I like Sora because it has a lot more books than other websites. Also unlike in-person websites you don't have to worry about returning books late. The website automatically returns it for you in 14 days."
In addition to our elementary school students having access to e-books, the same opportunities are available in the middle school where this week over 150 books were borrowed from our middle school collection of e-books.
Fostering a love of reading is a worthy mission and this new initiative combining the resources of the Hicksville Public Schools with the Hicksville Public Library will surely result in fostering a new generation of readers and writers. We look forward to the growth of this initiative.