For English teachers: Overview

Digital Theatre Plus has launched a new Virtual Classroom Toolkits to help support remote learning. New resources will be added to the toolkits regularly, and Digital Theatre Plus will notify email subscribers as soon as new content is available.

With the spread of the COVID-19 virus, and more countries either closing their schools, or locking down school campus, more and more publishers are offering temporary access to free eBooks and audio books. The Kerferd Library is monitoring these publisher offers and adding them to the Kerferd Library eBook and audio books LibGuide. See the following one stop link for details.

Many of the library resources for English teachers are found on EBSCOhost. The following search box allows you to search only on eBooks relating to literature and literary criticism. If promoted use you mConnect ID to log into these these services.

Hint: When searching EBSCO for books on literature and literary criticism use the full word. You can use boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR) as well as * as a WildCard, for example, novel* to search on novel, novels and novelist.

Click on the page image to access the English as an Academic Language LibGuide. This guide includes ebook and video resources to help students with spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Teachers can reserve audio books to provide additional reading and literacy support to individual students.

Example: Some of your students are struggling with the language in a set text so you want them to listen to an audio book while they are reading the book. Follow these simple steps to enable the library to set this up for you.

Please contact us directly if you need additional help getting started. 

Step 1: Check the catalogue to confirm we have the audio book in the library. In some cases we have more than one edition of an audio book so please confirm the unique ISBN or OCLC number of the audio book you would like reserved for your students.

Step 2: Email the library with:

• the book detail (ISBN and or OCLC number),
• the details of the student/s who need to listen to the audio book, the student name and mConnect user name,
• the date you want them to start listening to the audio book, and
• how many days you want them to take.

The library sets this up on OverDrive (see following image) and confirms the details back to you.

Step 3: On the date you have nominated the audio book is available for your student it will appear in the Assignments section of the student's Sora app (see the following image for details). Sora is the OverDrive app the school uses to provide access to the audio and eBooks in the school's online fiction collections. This online collection is built in partnership with Ruyton Girls' School. Click here for more information and support getting started with Sora.

Please note: The OverDrive Sora app keeps track of student activity, including the average reading / listening time per book. See the following image for details.