Grand Prize Winner:
Chagrin Falls Exempted Village Schools/High School

Students in our high school marketing class created this video submission with the help of our school resource officer.

Video linked here

Best in Visual/Virtual Display:
St. Mary’s Episcopal School

I decided to purchase and display e-book and audiobook copies of the American Library Association’s 2024 Youth Media Award winners. My idea was based on the concept that “Sora Makes Reading Sweet.” I also used a template in Canva to make a giant ice cream cone that lists “The Scoop About Why We Love Sora”. The individual scoops include reasons like “access is easy,” with instructions for logging in to access student or faculty accounts, as well as, “listen while you live,” which explains that audiobooks can make even the most mundane tasks more interesting. The goal of my display was to promote outstanding, award-winning works alongside Sora, while highlighting the many perks of how user-friendly the app is, in addition to why e-books and audiobooks offer exceptional perks for non-users.

Best in Social Media:
Best in Social Media:

Reading/Sora promotion videos in English and Spanish shared on our district and school websites and social media.

Sora for OUSD | Reading Is Awesome! (ENGLISH)

Sora para OUSD ¡Leer es Fantástico!

Best in Community Engagement:
Cash Elementary – Winston-Salem/ Forsyth County Schools

This year I started a journalism club with my students at Cash Elementary (K-5). We produce a monthly school newspaper they named “The Crucial Cougar News” using Canva to create it and we then house the newspaper on Sora for our school and community to read. This newspaper is entirely student-made and the students promote the use of Sora to by checking out the newspaper from the digital library. Members interview students and teachers, research topics, and write the articles directly into the Canva document before it is uploaded into Sora.   Since we started our newspaper at the beginning of the year, more students and teachers in our school have started using Sora. Most everyone is our school is now fairly confident in how to get to Sora, log-on, and checkout digital materials. Sora has been a great tool for us to spread all the wonderful things happening in our school to our community and stake holders.

Best in Sora in the Classroom:
Floyd T Binns Middle School/ Culpeper County Schools

As a way to encourage students to read or listen to books on Sora, we have put together a school-wide March Madness with Sora competition. We created Sora “classes” for each homeroom in the school and started tracking the homeroom reading data throughout the month of February. Throughout the month of March, I’ve been crunching the homeroom reading data to determine winners of the various lineups. I am basing this on user activity– basically, the winning classes are the ones with the most active readers (students logging in and reading for at least a few minutes each day). We organized it this way (instead of just based on total minutes read), because we wanted to give classes of all levels and abilities an equal shot at winning. The homeroom class that wins the March Madness competition will receive a donut party at the end of the month.  In order to keep students reading– even if their homeroom classes fall behind in the bracket side of things–we will also be offering individual prizes (gift cards, library swag, candy bars) to students and even teachers who are reading the most on Sora throughout the month of March.

Best Student-Made Submission:
Deer Park UFSD

As part of our Library Leaders club, students created this video to promote Sora in the Library’s Google Classroom and on our social media accounts (Instagram and X). They wrote, directed, and edited the entire piece themselves, and obviously had a lot of fun doing it!

Video linked here