Reference blog!

For my final project, I propose starting a blog using Blogger from Google. I like this program because it’s easy to use, has a lot of handy features, and has a nice appearance. For instance, there are access controls so the owner can determine who is allowed to access the blog and who is allowed to post to it. The templates allow for a customized appearance, and it’s easy to add permanent or temporary links as well as photos. Because the whole thing is done online, the owner can access their blog from any computer and make updates easily.  

I think this would be a useful way to share information and research help with my students, while allowing them to post comments and questions. The immediacy of the blog creates a feeling of relevance so that the students would think of it as a place to check on periodically, while teachers would realize that they could give me regular updates on their coursework. While it's possible to update a wiki or a website easily as well, I feel that the blog format would go further in my library to positively promote the benefits of social software.  

I am a high school librarian, and this service would help the students here because they often need a lot of guidance in their research, especially on knowing where to get started. Because our budget is minute, we don’t have many resources like databases or a great website, so I could take advantage of Blogger, which is free and has regular updates.  

Blogs have already been used in libraries, so I would be following previously set examples. At http://mabryonline.org/blogs/media/, for instance, a middle school has a blog set up for their library, but they also have blogs for every single teacher in school. The library blog has announcements, a word of the week, and links to interesting websites. They also post the classes that have library visits scheduled for the week. I also like http://ymci.wordpress.com/, the blog of a high school in Canada. They have a really nice format and their blog looks appealing and relevant. A boys’ high school in New Zealand has a really nice blog, but it hasn’t been maintained lately. It’s very appealing though, and looks as though it could be good at getting boys to read. When they were maintaining it, they posted about newly arrived books and posted pictures of the covers. This blog is aimed at teacher-librarians, but is really well done and is a great example of another direction in which a school’s blog could go. The author of it has included a lot of really good resources. And finally, this blog is the one I would ideally want mine to be most like. It has links that open a new window for research help, cover shots of new books, and provides plenty of links to homework help and other information.  

While blogger is free, an aspect that would certainly be viewed positively at my school, there are definite roadblocks. Social software is not viewed in a positive light. It’s considered to be a way to waste time and socialize unnecessarily, and while we don’t have filters here, sites like myspace and facebook are not allowed. I work alone in the library so there’s no library staff I’d need to get on board; rather, a challenge would be publicizing the blog so that teachers would be comfortable visiting it. I’d have to send out periodic reminders. We have the technology to support it since we recently got a donation for brand new computers, which was a really exciting event here. My main problem here is not finances or technology, but the attitude of the school culture here to these kinds of programs. I do think that if I wrote a good proposal including all the benefits I could think of, as well as an outline of how the blog would work and what would be included, I could probably get the support of my principal, which would lead to other teachers giving their approval as well. The whole thing would take some time to get rolling and to be utilized properly, but if I included a realistic timeline, that would be more understandable.

I would be most likely to use blogger, because it’s a program with which I am familiar and I like how it works, but I realize that wordpress is also a viable option, and is a popular blogging tool. It’s possible that at some time in the future if we ever were able to budget for it, my school could support a blog under our own domain name. It would also be exciting if teachers could blog as well, and we could all be connected.  

Maintenance of the software is not much of an issue because blogger is free and is supported by google, and they don’t have a prohibitive user policy. I would set the comment function so that my approval is required for posting, but other than that, I don’t think we would have much of a privacy problem. In addition, I would hope that the blog would be maintained by my successor if I decided to leave here, but it would presumably be effective by that time and would be considered part of the position.