OverDrive Education - Best Education & Reference App

Company: OverDrive Education, Cleveland, OH
Company Description: OverDrive Education – a division of OverDrive - is the leading digital reading platform for K-12 schools, offering the industry’s largest catalog of ebooks, audiobooks and streaming video. As a 100% digital company serving over 30,000 schools worldwide, OverDrive combines technology with content to support learning and reading in the K-12 classroom, library and home on all major devices.
Nomination Category: App & Mobile Website Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Education & Reference

Nomination Title: Sora, the student reading app

The date on which this nominated mobile site or app was first published: September 2018

The Sora student reading app enables students to read more. With Sora, K-12 students can borrow and read ebooks and audiobooks from their school’s digital collection and classroom curriculum, AND from the public library. Available on smartphones, tablets and desktops via browser, Sora empowers students to read for pleasure and complete reading assignments anytime, anywhere.

Sora offers many tools to help students and educators, including exportable notes and highlights, built-in dictionary, a dyslexic font and Google Translate. The app offers incentivized reading with avatars and achievement badges, classroom-specific personalized assignments, reading analytics and more.

The most groundbreaking feature connects students with their local public library to supplement their school’s collection of ebooks and audiobooks. This integration expands access to more age-appropriate digital books through custom filtering, providing more choice reading options for students.

Data shows that Sora is a tool proven to help students read more. Although summer typically results in less reading, over 600,000 students used Sora in April-July 2020 to read more than 5 million titles from their schools’ collections, a 500% increase YoY. Also, ebook and audiobook reading increased when students used Sora to connect to their local public library– 240% based on 2019 findings.