My Final Vision -- Scope and Design (LIBE 477B)

My website so far...

This course has given me a lot to think about and has helped generate many ideas for how I can contribute to and help develop our Library Learning Commons.  At first I wasn’t too keen on the blogging idea for our assignments, as I tend to be a private person and don’t really like to share a lot beyond those people I know and trust. However, as I come to think about this final assignment, I am finding my past blog posts helpful as they are a static resource I can return to and peruse when needed.  So, I guess that’s one take away for me from this course – the archive feature on a blog can be useful.

For my Final Vision Project I have two ideas in mind, which I think can work together.  Firstly, I would like to design a website where teachers at my school can collaborate and find resources.  Secondly, I’d like to try and implement a Teacher Spotlight to highlight great things happening at our school.   Realistically, I think that I will only be able to achieve the first outcome for this assignment, but I intend to use the website I design as place to display information about our Teacher Spotlights.

Is that confusing?  I think I need elaborate a little more. 

As we have learned, two key roles of a teacher-librarian are to facilitate ICT curriculum and pedagogy and to collaborate with teachers to co-plan, co-teach and co-assess.  My goal with my website is to create a resource where teachers can access various resources in a user-friendly manner.  Teachers are short on time and I want to create something that can be truly useful to them.   Some of the categories that I have brainstormed for my website are: professional development resources, collaborative resources, subscription services, virtual field trips, new curriculum, assessment, and MBS spotlight (Teacher Spotlight).  As I work on this assignment, I am sure new ideas will come. But that’s one of the great things about websites – they can change!

My co-librarian has created a great library website for our school which houses information about the library itself, the collection, access, research, past collaborative units, etc.  Through discussing my idea this week, we decided it would be best to have a separate website for teachers to access as the library website functions both for students and teachers.   This will enable me to reach my target audience: teachers at my school.

We have used Weebly to construct our library website and I will use the same platform for my assignment. This will offer consistency between the sites in terms of organization and features.  It is also a platform I am familiar with and know how to use.  However, I do intend to challenge myself to use some of the more sophisticated features within program.   For instance, I learned this week that I can have a blog within my website.   This is great news because it allows me to have a traditional website with tabs that teachers can navigate, but also a blog to feature my Teacher Spotlight section. Another great thing about Weebly is that I can have password protected pages. So, if there is content that I don’t want to share, I can keep it private. For example, I would like to list all of the subscription resources that the library purchases for teacher use.  In order to follow copyright law, we cannot publicly share the access information.  A password protected page, will help with this.

I originally thought I was going to use a Google Drive to share resources, but after discussing with my co-librarian we decided a website would be more user friendly for all staff.  Although many people in our school are embracing the Google Suite of Tools, not everyone is on board. A website is easily accessible by anyone and does not require an account.

My original plan for my Teacher Spotlight idea was to have a physical display in the library highlighting a teacher and something neat happening in our school.  I thought this would be a great way to build connections with staff and also create a community of sharing in our school.  I still like this idea, but have also decided that it would be good to have a digital presence as well.  This will allow us to share to a wider audience and keep a record of what has happened.  In order to facilitate this, I want to use the blog feature on my website.  With each new spotlight, I would include a new blog post so that staff and students can see what is happening.

Harness the power of Social Media

Additionally, I would like to try and use Instagram to feature these Teacher Spotlights. Through interviewing students in the library, we discovered that although many students know about Twitter, they don’t really use it. But, they love Instagram. So, we thought it would a neat idea to start an Instagram account for our library to share information about what’s new and happening in the library.    We can then also use this to share information about our Teacher Spotlights and hopefully one day, Student Spotlights! 

My original idea was to change the display each month, but I think realistically maybe starting with 3 spotlights in a year or something like that might be more manageable. Especially since, it’s already November!  Again, this is more a longer term goal than I think is realistically possible for the scope of this assignment, but it’s something I’m excited about and want to connect with the website I am building.

All photos taken from Pixabay and used under the CCO Creative Commons or are screen shots taken by me.