Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve worked with my practicum student Jenni to pack up my very messy New Tools Workshop wiki to new, much neater space. (And happily, our Tech Director, Kirsten Swanson, just joined the fun!)
It’s not perfectly ready-for-primetime, but I am pretty excited about our new New Tools Guide and about being better able to organize the tools my students, teachers, and I use so often.
Jenni thinks of the space as a graphic organizer for the stuff we need most. She is especially proud of our tabs on Backchannel/Chat, Fair Use, and Writing Tools. Of course, I asked her to reflect a bit on what we were doing:
Each of these tabs displays an assortment of links, websites thumbnails, documents, logos, and even live-streaming video. The New Tools LibGuide helps me visually organize all of the new resources we are sharing. It’s easy on the eyes, but packed full with information.
I hope that readers of this blog will also find our new Guide useful. And we welcome your suggestions as we build. And we thank so many of you experts you publish so generously and allow us all to aggregate your remarkable content!
Our other guides right now include:
- Research Tools
- Databases and Research Portals
- Librarian Stuff Guide will be coming soon!
About Joyce Valenza
Just added a page called “Cloud Storage” to the New Tools space. Loving this tool.
While the site is impressive, it’s also so darned *busy*–I’m not sure who the intended audience is, but it seems like tab overload to me.
Jude, the audience is primarily local. I am using it as a teaching tool here at school and for professional development activities. I see your point, though. As I look at other examples of LibGuides, I am seeing the value of white space and better use of subtabs.