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Home > Online Outreach for School Library Media Centers
Online Outreach for School Library Media Centers
10 Tech Tools to Build Connections
What's your message? A good place to start! What do you want your community to know about your library? Are you trying to get parents involved with activities in the library? Do you need a better way to get information out to teachers? Want the administration to better understand how the library fits in with their priorities? Are you trying to model effective use of technology for students?
Who's your target audience? Parents, teachers, staff, students, administrators.....
What's the best way to reach them?Ask them! Do they prefer paper newsletters? Email? Are they using RSS feed readers? Do they visit your web page? Are they on Facebook? MySpace? Twitter? Or ??
Pick two or three ideas that you interest you and try them out. We'll share experiences and tips during the session. There's no handout for this session, so you'll need to explore the tools to find out how they work. Use the instructor and your fellow students as resources to help you figure things out.
Don't have a web site that you can update easily? Use WordPress to create a flexible, fun and easy to update web site.
3: RSS
RSS lets people subscribe to your content and get the latest updates automatically. This content could be: blog posts, events updates, delicious links, twitter updates, flickr photos, articles from your databases - anything that has an RSS feed. And these days, tons of services have RSS built in.
People can use any number of tools to subscribe to your RSS feeds.
These are great tools for monitoring updates from a wide range of sources, Help your students, teachers, parents and administrators keep up to date with their favorite news sites, professional reading, fun stuff and of course, your library content!
Examples:
Creekview HS Library on Pageflakes - Brings together content from many sources. Pages on Pageflakes can be made public and shared with other users.
Librarienne - example of a librarian using Netvibes to organize lots of professional and personal information
Ideas to try:
Set up an account for yourself. Add feeds from your blog, delicious account, local newspapers, professional blogs, etc.
Set up several tabs for different subject and topics. What type of information do you want to share with your community.
Add content from lots of local news sources creating a page full of local content that can be shared with others.
Sign up for a personal twitter account to get a feel for how it works.
Get another one for your library
Post announcements of events, new resources, new books, tip of the day, etc.
Use Twitter Widgets to put your updates on your web page, blog or wiki.
People can follow your updates through their own twitter account, subscribe to the RSS feed, get your updates as text messages or even receive them in email via feedmyinbox.
Add web sites that will be of interest to teachers and administrators.
Use tags to describe the sites by topics.
Each tag you use has it's own RSS feed. Your teachers and administrators can get the latest items you add to delicious by subscribing to that RSS feed.
Ask them if they'd like to get updates from you, sign them up for email via FeedMyInbox. Or send them the RSS feed to add to their own feed aggregator.
Start an account and add books from your collection
Find others in your community who are on LibraryThing and connect with them there.
Use their widgets tool to highlight books on our web site, blog or wiki. Highlight a different part of your collection each month (use tags to retrieve just the books you want.)
Or use the widget to highlight recent additions to the collection.
Holding book related community events in your school? Post them to LibraryThing Local.
Use the RSS feed on the Local page to find events in your region. See RSS section above for more ideas.
NOTE: Here's a quick screecast on how to create a search alert in a Gale database and then add it to your iGoogle page.
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