Best Sites for Media Specialists

The Web has many excellent sites that provide both professional tools for media specialists and resources for teachers and students. One place that's a good guide to those sites is "'Best Sites for Media Specialists,"' assembled by Edith Fuller and Mary Bush of the Portland (OR) Public Schools Professional Library.

Built for a conference: Fuller (efuller@pps.k12.or.us) and Bush (mbush@mesd.k12.or.us) designed this page for a presentation they gave at the Oregon Educational Media Association (OEMA) conference last October. They had ideas of which sites to include, but turned to several online school-library discussion groups to see if they were really the ones media specialists would find useful.

Harvesting the e-mails: Fuller and Bush also asked colleagues to suggest sites they found most useful, and they got a slew of responses. "'I sat back and harvested all the e-mails and put the suggested sites into a database in alphabetical order by name,"' Fuller says. She particularly liked one suggestion that each library's own Web site be considered a "'best site,"' a reminder to media specialists that their own site is one of their most critical online resources. Fuller turned the suggestion into a category by itself, and listed four examples from various school libraries. Other categories include search engines for students and teachers, sites for national, regional, and state library media organizations, sites on collection development and maintenance, and favorite content sites.

Structured and hands-on: Fuller and Bush's presentation at the OEMA conference billed their site as a collection for the beginning media specialist or for the media specialist trying to deepen his or her knowledge of online resources. The three-hour session was a model research class that a media specialist could present to teachers, or--with some modifications--for students. "'Both Mary and I believe strongly that teachers need structured hands-on time to explore the Web,"' says Fuller.