Why not build a website for your school ?
Q - What's in it for our school ?
A - Think about the pupils.
One of the aspects of language we try to develop is a sense of audience. We also encourage pupils to be self-critical about their work. A pupil writing something for a website is writing to communicate thoughts, feelings and ideas beyond the classroom to a world-wide audience. With this knowledge there can be a much greater sense of audience for the writer and a very real incentive to produce work that is his or her very best.
Our language curriculum includes letter writing. Increased contacts with other schools and children world-wide means that pupils can often write to real people and do it cheaper and faster than via snail-mail.
Do your pupils gather data from other children and classes in the school for work in maths ? Ours do. They also use contacts made with visitors to our website to gather data from children and schools around the world. Recent surveys of "lifestyles" and "favourite breakfast foods" produced much more interesting and varied results when schools abroad returned survey data.
Website building is more a creative than technical exercise. Involving pupils in site design can provide them with exciting, meaningful and very rewarding creative challenges.
We like to recognise and celebrate success in our school assemblies and news letters.Having their successes mentioned on the school website gives the pupils an extra special form of recognition.
Having a website helps raise the profile of I.C.T.within the school community. It generates discussion, prompts questions and helps to teach children more about growing up in a "wired world".
Think about your parents and the wider school community.
A website helps raise the profile and status of their school and contributes to corporate identity and pride.
Seeing their children's work published on the site can give them great satisfaction and pride in their children.
Is there a more public way than a website of saying "thanks" to parents for all the ways in which they support the school ?
A website enhances communications with parents. They can see the pictures in the latest news letter in colour, access the latest changes to the school diary and read the latest hot news.
Think about the world-wide audience.
Share your successes with them. Help them to learn about your local area, culture and customs.
Think about colleagues.
Teachers trying to do the same challenging job as you, in your country and abroad. Use your website to share your ideas, experiences, teaching successes, plans and resources.
Think about your website as an open door to your school, inviting visitors to enter, look, learn and share.
Q - O.K. We want to build a website. How do we start ?
A - First you need an Internet Service Provider ( ISP) who will provide you with web space. The fact that you are reading this indicates that you have an ISP. Check with them to see if, as in our case, they provide web space as part of the package you or your Education Authority negotiated.
You need some way of producing pages for your site and uploading to your ISP's web- server.There are a number of ways of doing this.
If you want to learn HTML ( Hypertext Markup Language ) and have plenty of time you could write all your pages "longhand" in HTML and then upload them using something like FETCH. Lots of professional Webmasters use this method but it is slow and tedious for a learner.
Slightly easier, is to use one of the recent releases of the standard WP, DTP or Presentation applications. Most of these now allow you to save files in HTML format. If you take this option you could produce your usual school news letter using your standard WP program and then convert to HTML as a page on your website. You will than have to upload using FETCH or another file transfer program compatible with your ISP.
The easiest way, and it really is very easy, is to use a web authoring program. These allow you to type text, add and edit graphics, tables, links to other pages or sites and backgrounds. It is all WYSIWYG ( what you see is what you get ) and you need no knowledge of HTML at all. Pages are uploaded to the web server at the click of a button.
There are several web authoring packages available. These pages were first constructed using an early version of 'Claris HomePage' mainly because the site was first built on a 'Mac'. A move by our Local Authority to PCs as the preferred platform for schools and the arrival of a copy of Microsoft 'FrontPage98' thanks to the generosity of Microsoft to schools entering the "Road Ahead" competition means that these pages are now maintained on a PC using 'FrontPage98'.
'Frontpage98' is excellent. It took about an hour to get the hang of the basic features and another couple of hours to transfer the site from the Mac to the PC and rebuild some of the links between pages. As our site grows the links between pages are becoming increasingly more complex but the facility in FrontPage98 to display a schematic diagram of the site showing links and highlighting any broken links makes for very maintenance. Uploading is done by a button click and only pages that have been changed or added are sent to the web server thus saving line time. There is the usual Microsoft on screen indexed help available and a comprehensive manual. However the graphical user interface is so good that the author of these pages ( a subscriber to the "If all else fails - read the 'destructions' " school of technology ) has never used the on-screen help and seldom needed to turn to the manual.
Q - How could we get images onto a website if we build one ?
A - A picture's worth a thousand words and really adds interest to a site. They can also make a significant difference to the time it takes for a visitor to access a page. Have you ever clicked the 'back' button on your browser because the page you wanted to see was taking too long to load due to the graphics? Use images but use them sensibly. Don't put too many one one page and don't make them any larger than needed.
Many of the standard WP, DTP and Presentation programs come with libraries of images and clip art that may be added to a website. There are also many sites on the Internet where you will find clip art as freeware or shareware. Some of the paint and graphic creation programs will allow you to create your own images. If you have 'FrontPage98' then you should also have 'Microsoft Image Composer' which you could use to create animated images.
Real photographs of your school can be added in three ways.
One way is to use a scanner to scan photos. If you don't have a scanner perhaps a parent or another school could help.
If you already have access to a standard video camera, then for under £130 you can add an internal or external video capture device to your computer and 'grab' stills to copy into a web page. This is also a cheap and easy way of obtaining photos for inclusion in news letters or children's project work. The useful zoom and macro facilities on a video camera are lacking on the cheaper digital still cameras which are the next option.
The price of digital cameras has been falling steadily over the last couple of years. You should find that for a shade under £200 you can buy a camera that will produce photos of very acceptable quality and a little over £300 will buy a camera with added features and higher resolution, excellent quality images.We have used a digital camera for about three years and as well as producing the odd photo for this site we found it very useful for field trips and other school activities. We can have photos on the classroom wall or in children's work books within a few minutes of the picture being taken and with no film or developing to pay for.
Go on then - start building yours !