Oct 18 2007
School websites
How many school librarians run their school websites – I mean the official ones rather than their own library site? I am starting to look at ours with a view to revising and re-organising it.
So, what is the best way to use a school site? In England, we are now expected to develop learning platforms/VLEs. These will give students a flavour of the social networking sites that they inhabit, but with the control of adults. There are interesting from the school librarian’s point of view and many of us are beginning to use them to work beyond the walls of our libraries. I am wondering if we might feel a little constrained by these in the way that we want to develop our use of Web 2.0 technologies. Already, many of the filtering systems used by our schools block many useful sites – especially blogging.
Anyway, back to the school official site. Schools use these for many purposes. We are going to think about developing ours mainly as a marketing tool and using the VLE for the rest. It will be interesting to see how this continues to develop.
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I am the librarian at John Cleveland College and after completing an MSc in Web Information Development volunteered my services to help the ICT Assistant Manager develop the new college website. Although I have a certain level of technical skill my subject is mainly design. I am currently maintaining the site myself as my colleague is on long term sick leave. The main challenges are getting the content and in the correct format. It is very early days for us yet and I have just got the basics on but hope to develop it further as very limited time allows. I feel that although school librarians may not all have the relevant ICT skills to create, maintain and develop a site that our role must surely extend to managing the content in the future. This of course will then need to be reflected in our job descriptions.
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