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  (google.com/calendar/)

Examples:

• Analy High School Library Calendar - Sebastopol, CA

• Polly's Training Calendar

Ideas to try: 

• Set up a library calendar on Google Calendar

• Use the embed calendar options to customize a calendar to put on your web page, blog or wiki.

• Encourage other departments in the school to create calendars. 

• Display a consolidated calendar somewhere prominent on the school site.

• Google Calendar help.

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

• Dixie Grammar School - Anne Robinson, Market Bosworth, UK

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.

• 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.

• Feed readers - Google  Reader and  Bloglines are very popular

• Personal Start page - iGoogle,  NetVibes, PageFlakes

• email - tools like FeedMyInbox make it easy to get updates via email  

Ideas to try: 

• Check to see what services you're using have RSS feeds.

• Help students and staff use RSS effectively, by helping them set up feed reader accounts or personal start page accounts. 

4: iGoogle, NetVibes, PageFlakes

iGoogle,  NetVibes, PageFlakes

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.

5: Twitter

Examples:

• Library_Online - Dixie Grammar School,UK. Feeds news into sidebar of their website.

• Unquiet Library - Creekview High School.  Feed on web site.  

Ideas to try: 

• 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.

6: delicious

Examples:

• sfsdf

• afsd 

Ideas to try: 

• sfsdf

• afsd

• dfsda

7: Digital Storytelling Tools

Examples:

• sfsdf

• afsd

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Ideas to try: 

• sfsdf

• afsd

• dfsda

8: Flickr

Examples:

• sfsdf

• afsd

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Ideas to try: 

• sfsdf

• afsd

• dfsda

9: Google Docs - Get Feedback (docs.google.com)

Examples:

• Feedback Form for a workshop 

• Sports Feedback form

Ideas to try: 

• If you already have a Google account, just go to docs.google.com to get started. You can also sign up for an account at that page.

• What do you want to find out from your community? Don't create a huge survey, just a few short questions. Make it easy!

• Use the New --> Form option to start your form.  Enter questions, preview and edit till you're satisfied.

• Under More Actions, get the embed code to put the form on your own web pages.  Or  just send the URL for the form to the intended audienc.e

• Resonses to the form will appear in a spreadsheet by the same name in your list of Google Docs.

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.

•  

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.