TEEN PAGES AND HOMEWORK HELP REVIEW

I did not find any teen page that I liked better than the Hennepin Library’s at http://www.hclib.org/teens/ .   It’s colorful and attractive.  The staff has

successfully involved teens in the development of the site.  There is also a teen advisory board at the library that is referenced on the website.  The 

homework help is well categorized, which helps avoid too much scrolling.    

As a second choice, the St. Charles City-County Library in Missouri http://www.win.org/library/information/adult_ya_programs.htm deserves 

mention as a good site overall.  It promotes multiple teen programs that sound appealing.  One example is “Library Survivor” which I think might

successfully trade on the popularity of reality TV.  Many of the programs have grade level limits.  This site also gets high marks for identifying

YA staff and providing contact information.  This is something I did not see on the other sites I reviewed.

The Medina County District Library in Ohio. http://www.medina.lib.oh.us/teens.asp also has some very strong points.  The teen pages could perhaps 

be improved with something more exciting and colorful than file folders as buttons, but the organization system itself is outstanding.  To avoid too 

many clicks, expanding menus might also be added.  Someone took great care in choosing the linked sites.  For example, I didn’t know about the very 

comprehensive page of young adult bibliographies at http://www.seemore.mi.org/booklists/index.html.  I will probably be using that myself and 

recommending it to teens for years!  The Medina website also links to topics I didn’t necessarily find elsewhere, and ones that match our lists of 

young adults personal interests, i.e. make-up, shopping, electronic game cheat codes, chat, email, electronic greeting cards, clipart, and web design 

among others.  Besides likely finding these links helpful, teens would hopefully infer that librarians are in touch with their needs and might be of help

with other matters 

                                                                                                   

Other students have mentioned general homework sites that I am familiar with, i.e. BigChalk and IPL Kid and Teen Spaces.  Before you actually link 

them to your library site, I urge you to try doing research on them yourself.  BigChalk is a great free service, and a search there will produce some

fine results, but the multistep navigation required to do so is aggravating and time-consuming.  Minimally, a “back” button on every page would help. 

It also seems that subject descriptions, content clues and actual URLs of results could be presented on one page rather than requiring multiple clicks

just to decide if a result looks promising enough to visit.  I believe young people used to Google will not have the patience for this site, and it will not 

reflect well on the library as an efficient source of good information.

In the same way, in the IPL Kid and Teen Spaces, the  categorized links are outstanding, but the search engine still needed some work when I 

tested it last Fall.  At that time, a keyword search would bring up some good results, but also bring up others where the connection was at best 

obscure. This wouldn’t necessarily stop me from linking the site, but I would include a suggestion to  use the categories instead of the search engine.

One homework site that hasn’t been mentioned by other students is the one at The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh at 

http://www.carnegielibrary.org/subject/homework/.  I prefer it to the Multnomah site that has received a lot of publicity because it is keyword 

searchable.  It is also possible to just delve into a subject category here, but it will bring up heavily textual information about appropriate sites, so the 

user has to either ignore that and just check out the sites, or be a good reader.  (There is another area for younger kids as well.)  If you don’t find what 

you want using this site, the last category is “More Homework Help”.  The linked page provides a list of library homework sites that is extremely 

extensive.  Many have not been mentioned in our discussion, so you might want to record the url as a portal to use when designing a site of your own. 

http://www.carnegielibrary.org/subject/homework/indexes.html.

Another site that looks very helpful as a portal to information potentially helpful to young people doing homework is http://www.ed.gov/free/kids.html.  

It is a list of government agency sites constructed especially for kids.  It might even qualify as something they would be interested in browsing beyond 

their curriculum  needs.  By backing out into “Subjects” you can increase the listed resources exponentially, but since the search engine here does not

work well, in order for it to be helpful, consider setting up a proxy search from within your webpage, or teach kids about proxy searching with Google 

if you are just recommending the site rather than linking it.

This would also be true for another site, the Marco Polo.org Search Engine.  This searches National Geographic Expedition, ArtsEdge, EconEdLink, 

EdSiteMent, Illuminations, ReadWriteThink, and Science NetLinks.  Here the search engine is good, but it is only helpful for teens or kids if they 

remember to check the box at the bottom to exclude lesson plans.  Without doing that, the results are overloaded with them.  So again, one could set up 

a search from within the library website with this limitation as the default.

There are many wonderful links one could include on a homework help site, but it is also very important to make it visually uncluttered and simple to

use, so the biggest problem may be narrow the possible links down to a reasonable number.

Young Adult Services
Home