Its a techie world and if you want to be current and seen as in demand, it is absolutely necessary to have a Media Center website to represent your Media Center and the role you play in your school. It is an absolute essential to your relevance as a School Librarian to have a great and regularly updated website.
This website is in many ways your digital portfolio that shows your administrators, teachers, students, parents and community at large what you are doing and what resources you provide to the school. This website is free publicity and beyond using it as a resource for collaboration an d providing information, you should be using this site to promote your school library program! You have a book-fair coming up? Post some signs and information about it! You are hosting the county science fair? Post some pictures and snippets of what happened! You are having a read-a-thon? Let the people see the great time your students had! Utilize this wonderful tool to show the world everything you do to make your program memorable. Beyond all of the wonderful things you can do with your school library website, you have to use this opportunity for PR.
On our school library website, we use it as a chance to communicate a collaborate. We use the main page to post our hours and current events. We also post link to our services and about us, this way students can get a feel for what we are about and what the library can do for them. We collaborate with teachers on current projects and post relevant information to our page. We create pathfinders on different projects and post them for students to access. We can reuse these every year, as long as we make sure we check the links. For instance, we have a Greek Mythology page that both the Social Studies and English departments use. This helps us to communicate with students and teachers.
You should make your web page your own! Be creative! Let people know what your program is all about!
What a great point you make about the website being a digital portfolio! I think so many LMSs see maintaining a website as a hassle or added burden, but if you look at it the way you have it is just another helpful tool. Media centers have come under heat in the recent economy and, like you said, it is vital that we promote ourselves and how much we contribute to the schools. In this "techie world" so many people are more comfortable with using the internet than using a telephone to find out information. I think it is vital for students and parents to be able to access the media center in this way. It is only going to help us build connections to teachers, students, administrators, and the community at large. Thanks for the positive thoughts!
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of using a media center webpage as a collaboration tool for teachers in the building or district. Teachers and students from different disciplines (in your example: English and Social Studies) can see how topics are usually interrelated with each other. This would be particularly helpful for students to begin to understand that everything is related and global. A media center webpage can open the doors for students to research topics they're interested in via trusted internet resources. The media center webpage is not only a tool that can be used for positive public relations, but it can be a vehicle to introduce students to the world of interdisciplinary studies.
ReplyDeleteI think developing a digital portfolio is a great idea. By putting it on the media center web page you are making it available for everyone to see what you are doing and what is going on in the media center. Great idea. Collaboration is such an important part of educating our students. The web page is another opportunity for that to happen. Good job!
ReplyDeleteAlso, I really like the idea of putting pictures of the media specialists on the page. This will allow the students to know what they look like and when they start at a new school and walk into the media center it will be great for the student to see a "familiar" face.
Farris,
ReplyDeleteWe've learned in previous classes how important it is to show our stake holders what is going on the media center. This is another great way to constantly keep teachers, administration, and parents up to date on what is happening in your media center. Also, many students communicate best through the online format. High schoolers are especially involved with social networks, emails, etc. Having this media center page will be a great way to "speak to the student" in a format they are familiar with and are sure to use.
Communicating with students and teachers is essential for the media center. This is how we will be proactive educators in providing the most academic opportunities for our students, while at the same time, getting our parents and community involved. Having so many different links and resources on the website also provides for teachers to know what is going on in the media center and hopefully create a good relationship with them to open up the lines for collaborating. And with the technology being used, students are familiar and will want to get on the website because its what they do! This will also give parents, teachers and students access any where they have Internet. Once you get on a students level, (a.k.a technology) anything is possible. A media center website is the way to go these days!
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