Contest ended March 28, 2025. Winners will be announced soon!
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2025 Contest Categories
Best in Visual/Virtual Display or Bulletin Board
Share your best visual or virtual Sora display! This could be anything from a compelling Zoom background, a unique bulletin board, or a towering display case.
Best in Social Media
Share how you promoted Sora across your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.) to engage your school community.
Best Community Engagement
Have you spread the word about Sora beyond the classroom? Share how you have achieved the buy-in of your community; whether it’s through partnering with the local library (Public Library CONNECT), encouraging parent/guardian engagement, increasing faculty and admin. support, etc., we want to hear about it!
Best use of Sora in the Classroom
Show us how you have integrated Sora into the classroom to support your learning objectives with lessons, activities, or assignments.
Best Student-Made Submission
Sora’s impact on your students fuels our work. Share how your students have shown their love for Sora and spread that love to their classmates. Maybe it was a fun video, presentation, or even a song! We welcome all mediums.
About School Stars
School Stars is a global contest aimed to celebrate how schools promote Sora. For 2025’s contest, we’re looking for how your school has promoted Sora in the 2024/2025 school year (July 2024 – Time of entry). Past entries have included videos, visual displays, bulletin boards, social media campaigns, and student-created projects. We think anything you do to promote Sora is awesome and we can’t wait to see what you snap and share for this year’s entries. See official rules
Our prizes will be announced in early 2023. Stay tuned!
2025 Prizes
Grand Prize Winner (1 winner)
$3,000 USD in Sora Content Credit
1 School Stars Winner Poster
Category Winner (5 winners, 1 per category):
$500 USD in Sora Content Credit
1 School Stars Winner Poster
Category Runner-Up (5 winners, 1 per category):
$250 USD in Sora Content Credit
1 School Stars Winner Poster
Random Entrant Winner (5 winners, chosen at random):
$100 USD in Sora Content Credit
Check out our awesome 2025 winners!
Grand Prize Winner:
Daniel Pearl – Magnet High School
Daniel Pearl Magnet High School is an LAUSD school in Lake Balboa, CA with a magnet program focused on journalism and communications. The library and the video production programs at our school are relatively new. Our school library is small, and the library wanted to promote Sora’s Digital Library to increase access to reading beyond our physical collection. The Advanced Video Production class at our school took on this challenge to promote Sora by creating a short film.
Student Made Winner:
Chagrin Falls Schools
Through collaboration between the high school marketing class and the library, our students created a marketing campaign to promote the use of Sora among their peers. Students wrote, recorded, and filmed a music video recreating Ray J’s ‘One Wish’. Enjoy!
Social Media Winner:
Webb School of Knoxville
This year I’ve focused on creating reels for heritage and celebration months. Here are few of our recent reels celebrating books we have both in the library and on Sora. All of these have been posted on our Instagram, @WebbCentralLibrary, but it’s easier to just upload the videos.
Classroom Winner:
West Ottawa Public Schools
Mrs. Mangan teaches West Ottawa’s Newcomer English class. Her students have been in the United States for less than a year and come into her class with very limited English proficiency. How does she support them as they read their first whole-class, full-length book together? She partners with our school librarian, Ms. VanWeerdhuizen, to break down the barriers that would make it hard for students to comprehend the text. Each student checks out a printed textbook copy of Facing the Lion by Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton, a memoir of a Maasai tribesman growing up in Kenya and learning about Western culture and traditions. There are accessibility features in the book like larger print, more white space, and a glossary at the back to help with unfamiliar words.
Community Engagement Winner:
Lincoln Public Schools
We are doing “Read Around America with Sora”. In this program, our goal is to “visit” every capitol in the continental United States, beginning in our home state of Nebraska. Students read on Sora and every minute read is one mile on our trip. Students are begging their teachers for time to read on Sora and have begun reading at home at an all time high! We are tracking our progress on a hallway display and students cheer every time we get to a new state! This program is on-going, but we have made some wonderful progress. We’ve gone from only 106 students actively using Sora to over 250, so I am so very excited!
Visual/Virtual Display Winner:
Griffin Middle School
This year, we’ve introduced QR codes and signage throughout the library to remind students of the many ways they can access our collection. We now display both print and digital books together, highlighting eBooks and audiobooks alongside traditional print titles. Two new additions help showcase our digital collection right next to our print books: Shelf Talkers and “New Sora Books” bookmarks. First, our Shelf Talkers highlight popular authors. These signs not only display books in order but also link to the Sora collection via QR codes, making it easy for students to access digital copies if the print version is checked out. Currently, we’ve featured 10 authors, with plans to expand this list.
Reach for the (School) Stars – Webinar
Christina Samek, OverDrive Outreach Specialist, and Sarah Sansbury, winner of the 2019 OverDrive School Stars program, discuss print and social media resources to engage students, parents, staff, and other members of the school community in low- and high-tech ways. No time? Tiny budget? Christina and Sarah share their favorite tips and success stories, and walk listeners through the hows and whys of submitting entries to the program.
Check out 2021’s winners
Gatlinburg-Pittman Jr. High School (Grand Prize)
Sally Helton, Library Media Specialist, let us know they had only recently adopted Sora at their school —launching the platform on March 1, 2021. Her team decided to borrow themes from the very popular March Madness craze to introduce Sora to students. They used targeted social promotion but their centerpiece was their March Madness-themed Sora “hype” video. Great work, team!
JCSP Library Project Digital Library
Librarian Lorna Vogelsang let first year students vote on their online class read by creating a vote tool on Teams (a student system) based on titles that were always available in their Sora collection. This inspired a rousing debate that spilled over online. According to Lorna, students “were able to see the power of their voice and their vote, because the winning title only won by two votes!”
Laurel Public Schools
Per Librarian Mikayla Hirschkorn, “Sora is such a fantastic resource for students wanting to check out books on sensitive topics while maintaining privacy.” The display, sent out via email, features some of these sensitive topics and linked directly to Sora for instant check-outs.
Durham Public Schools
Per Library Staff Kathryn McCullen, one of her 4th graders heard about School Stars and got right to work on this amazing and suspenseful video. What a talent!