Shannon Miller’s Guide to Kicking Off A NEW and Exciting Community For Readers

We have a new place to engage our readers and continue to build their love and excitement around reading. It’s called Destiny Discover Engage.  

Our students are so excited to find this reading community when they go our Destiny Discover. I have also been visiting each classroom to help our students get started with their new reading journey in Engage. 

Let me show you how it works! 

Readers will receive Recommendations based on what they have checked out and the… 

…Reading Preferences they mark in the Engage Interest Survey. 

This pops up the first time students login and can also be accessed anytime… 

…under their name in the right hand corner. They can mark as many Interests as they’d like. 

This really helps students focus on what books they might want to check out next from the library. 

Readers can be part of Programs, which are reading initiatives within your school. These could be for summer reading, One School-One Book events, book clubs and more. 

I am using the Programs feature to promote our Iowa Award Books this year.  

I set up Programs for all four levels and our students have been joining these special new groups.  

In an upcoming blog post, I will share how to do this.  

Our students are very excited about the Challenges they can set up for themselves as they work towards their very own reading goals.  They can also add their friends and classmates to a Challenge too. 

Challenges are also found under the Book Club tab in their Destiny Discover. This shows one that a student set up for his friends. He challenged them to read 4 books about basketball in November. 

It is very easy to add any book from your library Destiny Discover to a Challenge. 

Students can be part of as many Challenges as they would like to join, and can also leave them at any time. 

A teacher or librarian can also set up a Challenge and invite students. 

The last part of Destiny Discover Engage is Insights and Badges. This helps students track their progress. They receive badges to help them celebrate their reading achievements. 

As our students have joined Engage this fall, I love hearing how excited they get when they receive a new badge.  It gives them the insight they need into making their goals and tracking their reading progress too. 

I am excited to watch our reading community grow within Destiny Discover Engage. 

It gives our students a safe and special place to come together online as they share their excitement and love for reading. 

You can find out more about this wonderful Destiny Discover add-on subscription here on the Follett site. 

Shannon McClintock Miller
Innovation Director of Instructional Technology and Library Media
Van Meter Community School
Van Meter, Iowa

Shannon McClintock Miller is the Innovation Director of Instructional Technology and Library Media at Van Meter Community School in Van Meter, Iowa. She is also the Future Ready Librarians Spokesperson working with librarians, educators and students around the world every day as an international speaker, consultant and author who has a passion for education, librarianship, advocacy, technology, social media and making a difference in the world and lives of others, especially children. Shannon brings a special expertise and vision to conversations around school libraries, education, technology, creativity and student voice. Learn more about Shannon on her award-winning blog, The Library Voice. Follow her on Twitter @shannonmmiller.