Media Center Web Pages: To Blog or Not to Blog?

I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking through school websites in search of one thing or another.  As part of the PTA and Foundation at my daughters’ schools, I did a lot of comparing between school programs in my area.  A few years ago many schools in Cobb County had very fancy websites that were unique to the school.  It has only been recently that the schools were required to use the same service for their websites.  If you were to explore different schools in the district today, you would find that there is a uniformity that was not there before.  On the one hand, it is easier to navigate to the various parts of the sites but on the other hand, they don’t always look as “pretty” as they did. 

My current position as the media center paraprofessional at my school has given me the opportunity to learn much more about school websites than I have ever known.  I am one of the two people in our building with access to update the school website.  That has been a very interesting experience for me.  We use Microsoft Web Expression for the website but all of our teachers, including the media specialist, use edublogs for their web pages.  Web Expression has not been the most user-friendly application but I have enjoyed working with edublogs which is super simple.

After reviewing some of the sample media center web pages for this assignment, I have come to the conclusion that blogs are much more effective for communicating with students, staff, parents, and the community.  The “regular” media center web pages are not as attractive as the blogs which are much more customizable.  Both have the capability to add content such as images and videos but the overall design and layout of the blogs that I have seen are much more enjoyable for me to look at.  If you want your users to return to your media center web pages, you need to make sure that the pages have a “hook” for them. 

When comparing the regular web pages to the blogs that I looked at, I knew that for my own media center program I would prefer to have a blog.  Even web pages like “The Unquiet Library” were very plain in comparison to a blog version of a media center web page such as the one at Mt. Bethel Elementary School.  My media specialist created the blog and I help her to update and maintain it.  We try to keep the content as up to date as possible and have something for everyone:  students, teachers, and parents. 

The main school website includes a direct link to the media center blog and teachers are encouraged to include a link on their blogs as well.  The media specialist has been collaborating regularly with the different grade levels and she has created a page for all class projects.  I recently received an email from my daughter’s Target teacher asking me to check the media center blog for updates on their current project.  Other teachers have directed parents to check the media center blog to see the final products of the collaborative projects that their classes recently completed in the media center.  It’s been amazing to see how much the teachers have been promoting the media center blogs.  I think more parents have seen our blog this year than the last few years combined.  Last year the media center web page was static.  The media specialist never updated it and it was generic.  The new web pages/blog is dynamic and always interesting. 

We rely heavily on our blog to communicate with parents.  We know that it’s working because I’ve spoken to many parents who appreciate that we have provided them with a quick and easy tool to communicate what’s going on in the media center.  We have a book club, participated in the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl, have monthly contests and collaborate with our teachers.  All of this information is readily available on our blog and it’s been great!

The answer to the question, “To Blog or Not to Blog?” is definitely BLOG!