Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Thing 35: Web Presence

I recently became the website administrator for my school and have been asked by the principal to make the website more attractive and engaging.  I am working with the districts technology staff to do this, but as long as I am focused on "web presence", I thought this Cool Tools lesson would be helpful.  I am limited to the School Wires website program, but I could ad links to other websites or blogs for teachers that are a bit more fun to work with.  The school website is not used often and many of the teachers are now using Google Classroom to post information for the students.  I have heard them comment that they don't need their teacher webpage anymore.  I hope to change some of those opinions with some examples of creative webpages with nice graphics, widgets, interactive forms, etc.

My favorite example of an excellent a blog/webpage is the Plymouth Regional High School Library, which is done on WordPress.  I must have spent over an hour just checking out all the neat features powered by all sorts of online technology.  I even learned something meant for students, such as the MLA template that is available in Google Docs; I will be directing my students to use this feature and will post this information on my own library webpage.  

The PRHS Library site is full of interesting and relevant information for reading and research, but the page is NOT crowded or wordy.  I think the librarian has managed this by using symbols in place of text with links to all the resources.  The webpage is also updated at least once or twice per week with fun facts or school news presented in a fun way with plenty of graphics and/or videos.  This is a nice way to keep your patrons coming back for new information.  Some other nice features are in presented in separate boxes with simple logos titled: Recommend A Book, Review A Book, Overdrive (eBooks), Kindle Collection (a Kindle account for the school), The Book Seer (awesome book title generator that I will add to my website), Your Next Read, and the amazing Book Club Website (Weebly webpage - nicely done), and PRHS Recommended Reading (every teacher posts their recommended book).  The banner by Library Thing with book covers was engaging and I liked the "Meet the Staff" pages - after reading about them, I would LOVE to meet them!!  If I created a page like this for myself, maybe some of the rest of the staff in my building would share a little more on their webpages!

Here is my About Me page that I just created; kinda simple at this point, but it does connect to my LinkedIn profile page:  https://about.me/diane.mohney


On the PRHS Library Website, there is a tab for research pages.  This section features a changing banner of beautiful book covers compliments of Library Thing.  I am not sure why this is on the research section, but it is attractive.  What I really like about this section, is the library calendar which uses a Google Form to get the details needed for teachers reserving space:

 Teachers can also see what is already schedule on the calendar.  Great tool for any library!

Lastly, I really like the 48 LibGuides that were created for the Research Pages.  The Libguides Home page is nicely organized with four main subject areas (Math, ELA, Social Studies, and Technology).  The Libguides themselves are easy to navigate with just the right amount of information.  I love creating Libguides and plan to create some new ones that are designed as simply as those on the PRHS site.

I did check out the Google Sites to see if I might want to try creating one, but I didn't see too many examples that I really liked.  The Staples Library was one of the best with visually attractive images/photos/vidoes, a few symbaloo charts (always fun), and a "New Fiction" gadget that I liked.  I thought the images and videos on some of the Google Sites took too long to load - some didn't load at all, so I guess I was not impressed.

I save the Free Technology for Teachers webpage to my technology bookmarks - looks like a useful source.    



1 comment:

  1. Great post, thanks for pointing out so many interesting things on the Plymouth site. They really have done a nice job of tying many different resources together in one place, without making a mess of it all. Your about.me page looks great. Good luck with moving forward with your plans!

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