Monday, November 3, 2008

Websites...filling in the deficient

Websites are awesome tools to reach out to parents. They can be in place to detail upcoming local events; provide resources for research projects; serve as an interactive, extensive learning tool; communications method; a source of fun learning activities; showcase for student talents, etc...
However, they are only and valuable if the site has users.
I am currently in a school with 80 -90% of the population coming from economically disadvantaged households. Many of these households don't have personal computers. So how do you make this a beneficial tool for them?

One idea that could hopefully get the word out more about a school’s website is to include it as a session during Open House. The media center at our school is often left out of this rotation. Parents get no information about the media center at all. This would be a wonderful time to showcase, showcase, showcase! Another way would be to extend the hours of the media center at least one night per week. We have media centers at the public libraries, but often the wait to use those computers range from 1-2 hours! It would benefit our low income communities in a great way if we would extend the media center hours at least once per week. Having the school/media center's website as the default page would increase the usability of the site(s) as well.

I also agree with another posting on feeling ill-equipped and prepared to build a productive school website. I do know that the media specialist at my school is responsible for doing so. But my question, what about when I am in my own media center. I would like to go in with a rich bank of knowledge of how to get started with building a dynamic website.

1 comment:

blogxton said...

V, I totally dig your idea of opening the media center during open house. It seems like a no- brainer. You also gave me another idea. I would make the default page on the client computers the media center’s page. Currently they go to the system’s page. Cobb County Library’s CobbCat is excellent! That’s what I have in mind. I don’t know about your other idea, though. I don’t think anybody would come up to the school to use our media center when there are some many convenient branches of the public library. The county branches have a much larger selection from which to choose and many more patron computers for surfing the catalogue and the web. Paul