New Topic for Discussion

["Pamela J. Dodson" <pjdodson@ACCESSONE.COM>]

As a high school librarian I am drowning in paper that I have run off or
been given with wonderful website addresses.  I started doing a home page
for the library to organize all these addresses so I could help lead
students and teacher to good sites.  I have become very discouraged.  Here
is the problem as I see it.  Please offer any comments up for discussion.

My view:

There are some amazing sites out there that have done a wonderful job of
organizing information.  Why are we all trying to invent the wheel over and
over?  How do we ever have the time and energy to create, maintain, keep
adding to more pages?  If each has a homepage, and each class (dept or
teacher has a homepage) how confusing is that for kids and adults to
access?  What is the point of all this?  All we have done is spend hours
creating another ton of sites to wade through.

What would happen if each district had a few librarians work together to
create one home page for all students in the district with off shoots to
elem, middle, high levels?

I don't know how to handle all of this?  It seems like we are now all in
competition in our districts to create the best page with the best links
and outdo each other.  I am not sure this is helping.

On a more positive note.  I am involved with a Telecommunications Study
Group which has been created in our district.  It has tech people,
librarians, and teachers.  We are only about 20 or so people.  It was a
voluntary sign up.  The purpose is to discuss the good, the bad and the
pros and cons of tech in schools.  How do we best integrate it into the
curriculum?  How do we best use it to help students?  It is great because
we all have a chance to discuss and discover things together.  It is very
supportive and allows teachers and tech people to hear library views.

Next time we are going to discuss the new filtering system we are trying
out on the Internet the district.  Librarians were asked to talk about
library views on intellectual freedom.  How we view censorship.

So I guess the real question is what do you think about how best to deal
with providing links for kids and teachers?  One of the tech people said to
me it seems like we are all working on creating indexing over and over.  Is
it our job to organize and censor sites by filtering systems of any kind?
Should we create district homepages that  index useful and appropriate
sites on the net that are the only ones kids can access through a school
day.

Well, there it is as best I can communicate my thoughts at this time.
Please feel free to write to me or to discuss on LM_NET if useful.




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Pamela Dodson
Librarian - Sammamish High School
Bellevue Public Schools - Washington
                                             "Books can be dangerous.  The
                                              best ones should be labeled
                                              'This could change your life'."
pjdodson@accessone.com
                                                        Helen Exley
dodsonp@belnet.bellevue.k12.wa.us

shpdodso@oasis.bellevue.k12.wa.us
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