Happy Tuesday! In this week’s message, we’re letting you know about all of the times and places that you’ll be able to find the WSDLC/OverDrive team while at WEMTA 2024! We’re also resharing out details about the Membership Survey (just 4 more days to complete it); February’s Flipped Classroom; and a reshare of last week’s 2024-25 WSDLC Quote messaging.
Find Us at WEMTA on March 4th!
WEMTA’s annual conference is in two weeks, and we’d love to see you there! Come say hello to OverDrive’s Connie Bowman and Beth Saxton and the WSDLC’s Sara Gold and Rebecca Rosenstiel at the Sora (#205) and WiLS (#207) booths in the exhibit hall at WEMTA 2024 on March 3-5 in Wisconsin Dells!
While you’re at the conference, be sure to join in one (or both!) of the WSDLC sessions being held on Monday March 4th:
with Connie Bowman and Beth Saxton
Learn more about how to leverage your school Marketplace account! We encourage you to bring your devices and interact hands-on as we showcase how to see your usage stats and top reports. We will also cover information on advantage purchasing, curation and filtering. Join us for a tour of all that Marketplace has to offer.
with Sara Gold, Connie Bowman, and Beth Saxton
Would you like to dig deeper into the administrative features of Marketplace to enhance your school’s offerings through the WSDLC? If so, this session is for you! Facilitated by WSDLC Project Manager, Sara Gold, she will be joined by Connie Bowman and Beth Saxton from OverDrive who will lead attendees through the Metered Access Tool, Student Data Dashboard setup and Curation of Advantage titles.
Sessions (co)hosted by Sara Gold and the OverDrive team don’t stop there! Make sure to pop in to one of these two amazing sessions on Monday afternoon as well:
with Sara Gold and Monica Treptow
Book challenges in school and public libraries reached a record high in 2023, according to data released by the American Library Association. Much has been shared about what school districts need to know when dealing with challenges to their library collections and threats to their professionalism. What is less often talked about is the personal toll this takes on school media specialists, including additional stress and altering curation practices, resulting in soft censorship. Join Sara Gold and Monica Treptow for a discussion on strategies for self care during and after a challenge experience. In addition to learning how to create a circle of support, the session will address how to navigate the dynamics between personal feelings and professional responsibilities of education and librarianship.
with Connie Bowman and Beth Saxton
Over the past decade, audiobook usage has grown exponentially among readers of all ages. Chances are, you’ve seen firsthand how popular they are among your students. And though some traditionalists might decry audiobooks as “cheating”, or as a reading shortcut, it’s simply not true. In fact, some studies have shown that reading a story via audiobook stimulates the same cognitive and emotional areas of the brain as reading more conventional print books or ebooks. Audiobooks also offer many additional benefits for your students – all of which you’ll learn about in this session, led by experts from WSDLC and Sora. Interested in building your students’ critical listening skills, boosting their reading comprehension and giving them new pathways to better reading scores? Then don’t miss out on this eye-opening presentation.
And while you’re at WEMTA, find out more about WiLS’ other projects, too! WiLS’ Nick Smith will be at the WiLS booth, ready to chat about all of WiLS’ services and projects, including Cooperative Purchasing. WiLS’ Kristen Whitson will be next door at the Recollection Wisconsin booth (#209), showcasing Wisconsin’s digital repository of digital cultural heritage resources and how they can be used in the classroom!
You can also hear more about this project from Kristen at the Recollection Wisconsin session on Monday March 4th:
with Kristen Whitson
Recollection Wisconsin is a freely available source for local and statewide digital history online. Join us to learn about the primary source sets and educational resources Recollection Wisconsin has to offer. We’ll lead you through some guided search activities to fully experience all Recollection Wisconsin has to offer, and you’ll leave with templates for activities for your own use.
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Final Days: Complete the Annual WSDLC Membership Survey by Friday
The 2024 WSDLC Member Survey is an opportunity for member schools and districts to provide valuable feedback to the WSDLC Board and Project Managers: what do you love about the WSDLC and Sora; how is your school/district using the collections; do you have any pain points; and what kinds of updates would you like to see from Sora and the WSDLC in the future. Responses will be used to help the WSDLC Board further develop the Consortium and the OverDrive service.
The link for the survey has been sent to all WSDLC members via email; if you did not receive the survey, please reach out to the WSDLC Project Managers at wsdlc-info@wils.org to have the link sent to you.
This survey will close on Friday, February 23rd, 2024, and your responses will be greatly appreciated. The survey should take at most 15 minutes to complete.
Thank you again for your time and thoughts!
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Flipped Classrooms: Managing Holds
This month, we’re talking about Managing Holds. Learn how to make the most of your Advantage purchases, and take a look at some of the features and programs OverDrive and the WSDLC employ to get the books your students want into their hands sooner. There is also an excellent marketing resource regarding holds created by one of our members!
Looking to get ahead? Beginning on March 1st we’ll be talking about Purchasing! (A nice tie-in to several of this year’s WEMTA sessions, too!) In this Flipped Classroom, you’ll get an inside look at how titles are selected and purchased for the Consortium. You’ll also find more details on how to purchase titles for your Advantage account: learn how to build and manage carts, add content credit, adjust the content access level for your purchases, and read some tips and tricks on how to avoid accidentally purchasing titles more than once (when you don’t necessarily mean to).
What are the WSDLC’s Flipped Classrooms?
The WSDLC offers a self-paced training series to help new members get oriented (and as a refresher for returning members) with their membership and the Sora collections. Every month, a different topic and set of materials are highlighted to help guide members throughout the school year. The content of these Flipped Classrooms is intended for library media specialists and anyone else who may help manage school/district library resources, OverDrive Advantage purchasing, and digital classroom materials. Materials are available for members to review independently, and OverDrive staff are ready to schedule one-on-one 20-minute sessions to answer members’ questions.
You can find more information on WSDLC Training opportunities and materials here: https://wsdlc.org/training/
Find the full calendar of self-paced training topics here: https://wsdlc.org/training/wsdlc-training-schedule/
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Coming in March: 2024-25 WSDLC Membership Renewal Quotes
We don’t have any updates to share regarding 2024-25 WSDLC Membership Renewal Quotes this week, but we are going to copy/paste last week’s details for anyone who may have missed it:
WSDLC Project Managers aren’t able to provide exact cost quotes for 2024-25 quite yet, as we use the previous year’s certified enrollment numbers as reported to DPI to calculate those costs. DPI hasn’t made that information available via WISEdash quite yet, but this data typically becomes available by mid-March. Once the 2023-24 school year data is available, we will be able to begin calculating the cost for each member district, and will email quotes to each school/district’s Main Contact within one week. (Not sure who your Main Contact is? You can reach out to us at wsdlc-info@wils.org to find out!)
To help you in your planning, as long as your school/district hasn’t seen a large change in enrollment between 2022-23 and 2023-24, your estimated 2024-25 WSDLC Membership cost will be roughly the same as it was for 2023-24.
Details on Pricing Quote Calculation
WSDLC renewal pricing is based on DPI’s certified enrollment numbers for the previous academic year. To calculate costs for the 2024-25 WSDLC membership year, we will be using the FTE data for 2023-24. We will take the FTE for your enrolled grades, and multiply this by $1.65 to get your 2024-25 membership year cost.
As a reminder, in March 2023, the WSDLC Board approved keeping the cost per student steady for 2024-25, with a 2% increase for the following two membership years. The price will be $1.65 per student for the 2024-25 membership year; increasing to $1.72 per student for 2025-26; and $1.74 per student for 2026-27.
*For WiLS MyWiLS Members Please Note: WSDLC pricing is not loaded into your MyWiLS account but will be emailed to you.
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The WSDLC project managers and the team at OverDrive are always available if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions.
Not sure who to contact? Check out this handy guide on the WSDLC website: https://wsdlc.org/who-to-contact-with-questions/.
