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 ??
• Try something new, evaluate it, try again, Rinse & repeat.

1: Google Calendar  

Examples:

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Ideas to try: 

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2: Blogs

Examples:

• Conan the Librarian's Blog - Carol Ansel, Pine Point School Library, Stonington CT

• The Unquiet Library -  Buffy Hamilton, Creekview HS , Canton, Georgia

Ideas to try: 

• Get a free blog at: Wordpress.com, Edublogs or Blogger

• Share news about the library, new resources, class resources, new books, tech tools.

• Your blog will have an RSS feed - teach people how to use that to get your updates.

• Use feedmyinbox for those who want to subscribe to your posts by email. Directions for ceating a simple signup form for your blog.

3: Twitter

Examples:

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Ideas to try: 

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4: delicious

Examples:

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Ideas to try: 

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5: Storytelling Tools

Examples:

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Ideas to try: 

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6: flickr

Examples:

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Ideas to try: 

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7: Google Docs - Get Feedback

Examples:

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Ideas to try: 

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8: iGoogle, NetVibes, PageFlakes

Examples:

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Ideas to try: 

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9: Facebook

Examples:

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Ideas to try: 

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10: LibraryThing (librarything.com)

Examples:

• luv2read - Online teen book club San Jose (CA) Public Library

• LeBrisary - LibraryThing widget, notes that most of the books are in the school library collection.

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Ideas to try: 

• 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.