Creating a Website for My School Community

What a week it has been. Admittedly, I haven’t had a lot of time to do research due to being very short-staffed at work and having to take on a second role, but I have been thinking more about what I want to include in our library website, especially after we hosted our first open house for parents on Friday. During the session, we had a slideshow of information that we went through and then demonstrated how to search for books and it was all information I think needs to be held in one place. I have also been looking at the documents Sonia shared over the last two weeks and I found myself nodding my head a lot at what she said, which helped me to frame my thinking a lot.

Currently, our school website is really aimed at prospective parents and current community members click a link which leads them to our library catalogue. Eventually (once we feel ready to share our new site), I would like to see our Libguide site be the link on the school website. This will lead them to our new library website which will include all of the information we currently hold in multiple places or have to send as emails.

As the target audience of the site will be all community members (students, staff and parents), I want to make sure there is something for everyone. I want to be transparent from the start and state that I have not designed this libguide from scratch. In fact as I began exploring this week, I realised communication with my team is critical as I discovered there is already an updated main page that only the head of my department knows about. I had thought she had only created and updated the pages for the students she works with.

As I looked at what we have so far, I realised the need to break the libguide down more by the sections of our school. There are currently no tabs for the students I work with in EY1 - Grade 2, and with such a range of students (3 - 14 year olds), I think it is necessary to break down some of the tabs further so that students, staff, and parents can easily access age appropriate information. I want to add tabs for  Early Years, Primary, and Middle School and then add tabs/dropdowns within that with the relevant information. This should also make viewing the tabs more visually appealing.  

I am going to include screenshots of what we have so far, and my plans/hopes for adding to & editing what is there, as well as new pages so that my intentions going forward are clear.

Main page:

Although we have some basic information about our hours, I would like to also include a link to our book order form and information regarding our current campaign for volunteers. I also want to update our photos and include a link to our email addresses.  One thing I am not sure about is whether to add some news here. As it will be the first page parents see, I want to highlight events, but I am not sure if it will overwhelm the page.

    Current main page of our Libguide                                                      

 The tabs along the top feel very busy and don't reflect diverse ages of our community

Research With Library Resources and Audio and Ebooks:

I want to make a separate tab of links to appropriate sites for our younger students. This will be contained within the EY tab so that our students and parents can see the most appropriate links for their needs. For the audio books, I plan to also include links to some storytelling podcasts as we don’t have much of a range of ebooks for our younger students. I think it would also be useful to include a how to video on borrowing the ebooks.

 I would like to create a separate tab for early years students with links to relevant databases 

 

This is another area that needs to be broken down to reflect the needs of all of our community members      

Search for Books:

This is a tab I especially want to develop. I think this is the perfect place to include some how to videos or pdfs. Things like how to search for books as well as how to log in and view your account, place holds, and renew books.

There are many tutorials for using Destiny that could be added here                                       

Lastly, I want to give a little update for people about how the reduced Covid mandates have impacted my school. I believe it has been a little over five weeks since most restrictions were reduced in Switzerland. This came during our weeklong break from school so we came back to a no mask rule. My team as well as other individual staff and students chose to keep masks on for protection, and within 2 ½ weeks case numbers were extremely high (up to 25% of our staff out with covid, many for the second time) .

We went back to staff needing masks and office staff working from home when possible. Parents were asked to wear masks five days later and our staffing situation has been critical with all specialists being pulled at some point to take classes. We’ve been short a team member for a week and a half (though not due to covid) and I tested positive on Saturday morning after fighting what I thought was another cold all week. Despite this, we are back to masks being optional on Monday. I’d like to say we are over the worst, but it will be interesting to see what the rest of the year brings for schools.

References:

Baumbach, Donna (2004). What should be on a school library web page? Learning and Leading With Technology, 32(1). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ695797.pdf

Morris, Kathleen (MAy 19, 2021). School library websites: Essential features and examples. The Edublogger. https://www.theedublogger.com/school-library-websites-features-examples/

Sonia (March 21, 2022). Final vision project brainstorming. Library studie: Reflections and Responses About Teacher Librarianship.https://booksarecool143770636.wordpress.com/2022/03/21/final-vision-project-brainstorming/

Sonia (March 25, 2022). Target audience : vision project. Library studie: Reflections and Responses About Teacher Librarianship. https://booksarecool143770636.wordpress.com/2022/03/25/target-audience-vision-project/