Library Spotlight: The King's College, Cambridge, United Kingdom

ePlatform School Spotlight of the Week - The King's School

We are excited to shine a spotlight on The King's School, Canterbury, in the United Kingdom.

We reached out to Philippa K. Rose,  to see how they were keeping their students engaged with digital reading. Read their response below.

The King’s School, Canterbury is an independent, day and boarding school for girls and boys aged 13-18 located in Kent, England.

Situated within the grounds of both Canterbury Cathedral and St Augustine’s Abbey, our school is medieval – historically speaking! The library is a relatively new addition at just over 250 years old, and we’re keen to support the changing (and challenging) needs of our (mostly Generation Z) users.

Our pupils lead fast-paced, online lives, and have to navigate the tricky years of academic study and exams while maintaining lively and full social lives. Wheelers puts the ease and enjoyment back into reading; offering immediate, on-the-go access to a wide-ranging collection of books to excite even the most fleetingly curious of our school community (they’re teenagers, after all)!

The app is a great way to exploit everyone’s reluctance to go anywhere without their phones, allowing us to spend brief periods (waiting in line for dinner or whilst sat in the car) reading short passages, as well as sustaining longer periods of reading on our various devices. For those pupils who aren’t so keen to be seen as readers, the app offers a welcome disguise. It’s also a useful bridge between pupils not finding the time to read and becoming mature readers, by keeping their love of reading alive over those difficult years when reading ability can often stagnate.

We love the breadth of the collection, which entices our newest readers, right up to our more experienced staff; developing a sense of reading community that we struggled to create with traditional book groups. The ability of readers to request items means there’s a real sense of ownership about building the collection too.

Our learning support department really appreciate the audiobooks, which not only help our dyslexic readers (who often read the text while listening to the audio at the same time), but they are a great way to encourage our ESL pupils to build confidence about reading more challenging texts too.

Popular reads include Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Jennifer Niven’s Holding up the Universe, Erin Morganstern’s Night Circus, and Isabelle Allende’s Eva Luna (in Spanish). Our stats (although we’re fairly new subscribers) show we’re matching our physical book borrowing on Wheelers e-books and audio; and we’re identifying lots of pupils who were previously not using the library, now reading with Wheelers!

On a more practical note, the set-up (while daunting!) was easy, completely pain-free, and very fast. Once you’re up and running with the subscription, customer service remains excellent. Any queries I have are responded to really quickly and in clear, straightforward language – no tech-speak, thank goodness!

Only time will tell how our relationship with Wheelers will grow but I’m really pleased to see how it’s already improving our reading community, and I’m excited to think about how our pupils can grow personally as well as academically with the wealth of literature in their pockets!

— Philippa K. Rose

Associate Leader of Learning

Thank you, Philippa.

If you'd like your school or library to be featured, contact ebooks@eplatform.co