Beth Bartlett

1. I took the Georgia Department of Education listing of school districts from http://www.doe.k12.ga.us/findaschool.aspx?CountyID=ALL&RID=111, pasted it into a Word document, and deleted the "extra" stuff.
2. I used the Bullets and Numbering feature to assign numbers to the districts, from the top down, 1 to 180.
3. I narrowed the list to 25 elementary schools:
   a. I used http://www.random.org to generate a sequence of 25 different numbers. I pasted those numbers into my Excel file, looked up the districts that correspond to those numbers, and entered the districts into the Excel file.
   b. For each district, I followed the link to the Georgia Department of Education listing of its schools.
   c. I picked the 3rd elementary school (from the top) in that district. (If there were only 2 elementary schools, I picked the 2nd one. If there was only 1, I picked that one.)
   d. I entered those school names into the Excel file.
   e. For each school name, I used the standard convention (www.[DISTRICT].k12.ga.us) or the link from the Georgia Department of Education listing to find the school district's home page.
   f. I attempted to follow the link(s) through to find the home page for the library media center.
   g. If there was a library media center page, I recorded its URL in the Excel file. (If there was none, I noted that, too.)
   h. I repeated Steps e though g for each of the 25 schools.
4. I repeated Step 3 for 25 middle schools.
5. I repeated Step 3 for 25 high schools.

This yielded 47 library media center Web sites. I reviewed each one against these content criteria:

1. First, was there enough "content" on the home page? If any of the following applied, I recorded it as not having enough content.
• The page consisted mostly of "under construction" or similar phrase,
• The page was blank, with the exception of the school site's navigation links,
• There was no content other than staff names (or names and photos)
2. Next, was there a "last modified" date? If not, was there a Calendar of Events that gave a clue as to when the page was last updated? I recorded the dates and later examined the list as a whole. If the school level had more than 10 sites with enough content, I used the date of last revision and then their random numbers to narrow them down to 10.

The collection spreadsheet served two purposes:

1. recording Web site descriptors: school, grade level, URL, date of last revision (if available), etc.
2. recording findings of the terms/descriptions of media literacy activities

List of column headings in Excel file:

• School Level
• School Name
• Library media center URL
• Enough Content? (Y/N)
• Date Last Modified (if available)
• 1+ MediaLit Activity? (shorthand for "evidence of 1 or more media literacy activities") (answers in this column were Y/N)
• Details (of the previous column)
• 3+ MediaLit Activity?
• Details (of the previous column)
• 5+ MediaLit Activity?
• 2nd Level Pages (will be a link within the file to a row for each 2nd level page)
• Date Checked (by me)

medialit_terms.xls