Our school district (K-12, 500 students total) is looking for a new superintendent and a new journalism teacher. I am trying to encourage the school board to emphasize technologically-hip teachers and administrators so our kids aren’t left behind in the cyber-dust.
Do you know of any school (public would be most similar) district (up to high school) that has an exemplary web site? If it’s your community or kids, great, but if you know of others you admire, please post a URL.
And tell us why you think this is a good web site. I’m especially looking for ones that the kids are able to use, learn from, and be proud of. It’s all preparation for The Real World that follows high school!
It depends on what you’re looking for. There are tons of services and sites out there, so it would be helpful if you could describe that a little more.
Also, there is a textbook that you may find helpful. It’s called Transforming Learning with New Technologies. It’s an introduction to instructional technology, which is what I think you’re looking for. That will give you some good resources.
A lot of the schools in my region use Edline as a web portal for most of their class and activity content, much in the way that many universities use Blackboard. Having been an admin for it at one point, I can tell you that, though it has a lot of good qualities (flexibility and a lot of tools), it’s clunky, not user friendly and really limited for what I can do compared to the university level web portals.
I can speak a little from my field (libraries), but my expertise is a little limited to what I’ve had to play with. Are you looking to put all of the curriculum online? Are you trying to keep parents abreast of school activities? Is this to be an interactive site, or just a static “splash page” type site to keep parents informed? A good deal of what you’re talking about in your intro tells me that a significant portion of what you’re looking to improve in the students’ curriculum is information literacy and transliteracy, and you want to use the web as part of that. Here’s one librarian who works with middle school students on those skills.
The reason why I ask the questions in this post are because there are so many ways to achieve the end goal of getting students prepared technologically via websites, etc. If I throw too many options at you, which is what you’re asking for, it isn’t going to be helpful.
I’m not looking for software. I don’t want to know how to do it. I just want to see school web sites to show the proper authorities what can be done. I just want examples of the best. URLS, y’know, and all that. Anyone got any?
If you’re talking about your average district website, it’s going to have information for the parents and community, e.g., the academic calendar; any required legal information, such as test scores and so forth; menus; links to individual schools; information for staff, and so forth. It’s not going to be “something kids can learn from” unless you want models for hypothetical journalism students. That said, however, many districts use something like Edline to make it easier to maintain the site. However, with something like Edline, you’re not going to get truly awesome sites because they’re based on templates. A template is a template is a template.
Otherwise, I’m still not clear on what you want. If you’re looking for URLs and such, Google school districts in your state to see what they do.
What is not clear about this: “I just want to see school web sites to show the proper authorities what can be done. I just want examples of the best. URLS, y’know, and all that. Anyone got any?”
I don’t want random examples, I want good examples. I don’t want google searches, I want examples that you recommend. Got any?
Sheesh. What’s so hard to understand about my request?
I have a feeling this isn’t what you’re looking for (a nice website?) but the Eastern Townships School Board has a program called the Enhanced Learning Strategy in which children are given/assigned laptops starting in Grade 3 and use them until they graduate high school after Grade 11 (this is in Québec, so the school system is different). This is a public school board serving the anglophone population of the Eastern Townships - it happens to be a good size to get funding from companies and governments for guinea-pig type projects like this one.
This is the webpage for the ELS, which lays out the results so far and some of the goals and objectives of it. This program has been in place for 7 years and I believe it’s well thought of. I know my cousin, a grade 4 teacher, develops websites and movies and all kinds of multimedia in her classroom with her kids.
So far, the sites I’ve seen look (visually) fine. Most have a calendar, a few pix of smiling, happy students and the campus. They have resources for parents, students and teachers to communicate securely, look up lesson plans, lunch schedules, and some have faculty emails and phone numbers along with their position.
What I would expect to see if the school was really progressive would be much more student involvement. Students have been producing weekly newspapers for as long as I can remember, and it’s a tremendous learning tool. II know of schools that produce their own closed-circuit TV news shows. Why shouldn’t they do something similar with the WWW? I would expect a daily news column or video – what’s coming up, what’s happening, welcoming new staff, showing pix of new facilities, video interviews of retiring teachers, performance videos of music and drama students. For the art department alone, I would expect posters of events – community or school – and montages of things past. Why not highlights of the last football game? Stories about exchange students? How about yearbook photos and bios of alumni who are now famous?
This can serve as a training ground for many careers – journalism, creative writing, photography, videography, production, art, promotion, advertising, public relations, communications and related technical jobs. If the kids aren’t using the web for these, what are they learning with?
A lot of school websites are controlled at the district level, so there is not a lot of student involvement. That said, however, there is no reason why students can’t run their own website, and there is no reason why the district can’t link to that site. What you might do is contact the NEWSPA organization, which is through the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh journalism school. (I’d link to it, but I’m posting from my phone.) They have resources and such for high school journalism programs and may be able to offer some guidance.
I posted some links earlier, but to the wrong thread. They would just be more of the same. This is what I would expect from a school site.
I know of several schools that do this, but anything student-produced / featuring students (whose parents haven’t signed modeling releases, etc.) is all within login-pprotected areas. Most parents seem very nervous about anything about their children being available online.
It’s not just modeling releases. In Pennsylvania, where I live, parents have to sign permission slips specifically allowing their kids to be photographed while on school property and at school activities. This is because of fears that a non-custodial parent can use photos to locate the child; this especially comes into play when there is a restraining order against the non-custodial parent, or any other adult. (This isn’t an urban legend or moral panic. There are kids for whom that fear is real and legitimate.)
So unless you get specific permission, you can’t take photos, video, or use any other recording medium.