engaging school communities

Glodowska, D. Book. CC0. Edited with Blabberize.

A website for a school library can serve multiple purposes, but the most important seem to be

1. provide information
2. invite collaboration and participation in the both the physical and online library spaces

As I looked through some sample library websites, I found that there is a lot of information libraries can communicate to the school community: research and paper resources, library catalogs, upcoming events, resources for specific classes, and online tools (I saw a few links to the audio tools we discussed in our last blogs). The collaboration and participation is important because that is what invites the students and teachers into the library (physically or digitally) to make best use of the information provided. I think students being in the library is ideal, but often it takes bridging a gap between the "institutional" feel of a school and students' regular lives with QR codes, Pinterest, and Twitter to engage them. The most effective library websites I found did a good job of piquing student interest through social tools, and then had wonderfully organized information for students looking to use the library resources.

In my mind, if a library website can achieve those two goals, then I envision students learning and being engaged in information fluency and media literacy!

I found a few library websites that I thought were effective. 

1. The Springfield Township High School Library website uses Smore, which makes the website fairly static (no stream of posts) and requires scrolling instead of navigational buttons, but I think that the content is particularly effective in inviting students to "click" on links, use QR codes to navigate to resources, watch videos, and download helpful apps.
2. My favorite might be the Wellesley Middle School Library website, which used Weebly. Someone spent a LOT of time compiling resources and making sure that there was no need to "click" more than once to get somewhere within the library site itself. I think Reynolds might have a few critiques about inconsistent alignment and unplanned white space, but the home page of this website draws students in through its use of videos and interactive media, then provides tons of information.

Based on the websites I found, I think that I am going to try a Weebly site. I have tried to use Google in the past, and while I found that it was easier to customize colors, backgrounds, fonts, etc., the layouts tend to be very cumbersome to change (read: lots of time and investment) if someone wants them be visually appealing. Wix and Smore seemed neat, but I think that I envision including a lot more information on a website than would be easy to provide with Smore, and the templates in Wix didn't appeal to me. If I get stuck with Weebly, I will try my luck with one of these others!