SLMC Reflection

At first, I was apprehensive of going out and starting a new library media center website for my school. I have my own classroom webpage that I had made during a class given by our technology integration specialist of our district. It was a lot of work and took weeks to get the layout the way I wanted it. I basically had to start each page from scratch. I always had issues updating it because the domain is part of my district and there are channels to go through. Because of this, I only updated it a few times a year. Instead, I used my blog more as a communication center for my students and their families. It has been over three years since I took this webpage class and a lot has changed.

I couldn’t believe how many options we had to create a new website and how user friendly these sites could be. I started out by researching the different webpage creator sites and picked one that I thought would be the easiest to manipulate, update, and also represent the SLMC website for our school professionally. The one I picked was www.weebly.com. I created a website: www.mckinleylibrarymediacenter.com. I looked around at the templates and started manipulating some of the features to get a feel for how the site worked. I was so excited that I didn’t have to create each page from scratch!

I read the article that Sally gave us, “What Should Be on a School Library Website” and started adding ideas into the bubbles on Inspiration. I then started moving the bubbles around and connecting them together to map out how each page would be organized and with what categories.

Weebly was super easy to work with! I quickly created a page for each category. I like how easy it was to pull down a title into the page, divide the page into columns, add images, create links with images or text, and embed html codes. I found many useful pages and sites to link to by searching other library websites in my district, my district’s teacher resource website, and my district’s technology integration website. There was so much I wanted to include, but there wasn’t enough time. I figured that this is an ongoing process and the website can be added to as I find new and interesting information and sites to add.

I started with seven pages and would like to add more once the school year gets rolling. I thought I would poll the classroom & specialist teachers at my school and get their favorite learning sites to post for each grade level. I wanted to add some widgets to the last page, “Miscellaneous and Fun.” I found a quote of the day widget that I got working just fine. Unfortunately, I am still trying to troubleshoot why I can’t get a weather, word of the day, or problem of the day widget working. I continue to work on this problem as I write this reflection and hope to have it resolved shortly.

I talked with my teacher-librarian a few weeks ago about this project. She thought maybe I could just update what she has already done. However, she took that webpage class with me 3+ years ago and her library site is one page. I looked at the page to see what I had to work with and unfortunately, many of the links don’t work and it hasn’t been updated since March, and only with Author of the month links. I know she has some of the same problems with it as I do and I think she would be as excited as I was to learn about some of the new and easier tools that are out there to create websites. I hope that she is willing to link the site that I created to our school website and use this for the library media center website instead of her page. I would be willing to give her access to the account and show her how to use weebly so she continues to have control over the SLMC website. I would hate to see my hard work go to waste. I know I could use what I created at the school that I move to when I become a librarian, but I did make it for McKinley Elementary.