Thu. June 13, 2019
MCHENRY, IL – Nearly two years after introducing Follett Collections by Destiny®, Follett is reporting a total of 2.5 million users, a dramatic increase in usage of the educational tool that allows librarians, teachers, and curriculum staff to share free or purchased resources across the district, schools, or between users. Now in use by more than 4,000 districts and nearly 17,000 schools, usage of Follett Collections by Destiny® has increased 62 percent from year one to the 2018-19 school year.
“Collections is my go-to place for curating, organizing, and sharing resources while collaborating with my colleagues and working on my own,” said Shannon McClintock Miller, K-12 district teacher librarian at Van Meter Community School District in Iowa. “I create and work with Collections every day, continuing to curate and share all of the amazing resources I find. Collections shows Follett’s expertise in continuing to build a bridge from the library to the classroom.”
Of the 2.5 million users, Follett is reporting 60 percent of those users are students. A total of 211,000 Collections have been created by users in the subjects of ELA, social studies, science and STEM/STEAM, and mathematics. With Collections, teachers can quickly pair content to instruction while students can collect and curate resources for assignments, projects, and tasks.
Follett unveiled Collections at the 2017 ISTE Conference, and it was a Tech & Learning “Best of Show” award winner at the 2018 ISTE Conference in Chicago. Fully integrated with Follett Destiny Discover® and the Follett Destiny® product line of free- and subscription-based services (as well as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and direct Google Classroom sharing), Collections can include any resource, including Open Educational Resources (OERs), webpages, images, and documents, and all can be easily added with the click of a button.
Since its debut, Follett has been continually offering updates and improvements to Collections, such as playlists. Classroom teachers can create favorite playlists (similar to music playlists) and easily share them with their students. Designed to support personalized learning and differentiated instruction, multiple playlists can be created for the same lesson, with students progressing through at their own pace. Students, meanwhile, can use them to present group projects.
“We investigated various platforms and decided that Collections by Destiny would allow staff to curate resources that could be easily accessed through the Destiny Discover module,” said Kate MacMillan, coordinator of library services for Napa Valley (Calif.) Unified School District, one of the original #GoOpen school districts in the country. “With this blended model, we can combine audio, video, print, primary sources, articles, and websites into a multifaceted CARD (Curated Academic Resource Delivery) that supports our curricular needs.”
“Napa Valley’s goal has always been to provide our students with equitable and effective access to information,” MacMillan continued. “In the last few years, student and faculty use of OERs, databases and other digital resources/materials has increased exponentially. Curating these resources into a manageable delivery format that was technologically nimble became a high priority.”
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