LearnShifting

I think anyone who has worked in a school has realised that although a website maybe important for a school, whose job is it to create and maintain? I was surprised to find that although I expected teachers with computer skills to be involved, or an enthusiastic parent or possibly even be outsourced to a local company - it was the school Principal who in many cases took a leading role in the look, feel and content of the website.

I hear many of you thinking "We knew that!". But, to add to this revelation is the fact that some principals actually build the website in among the myriad of other tasks involved in running a school.

Here is a typical scenario played out in small schools across Australia (and even further I suspect). An energetic teacher and principal supported by the school council have a website built. Someone is trained to upload content. There are easy parts of the website to maintain (like uploading the weekly newsletter) and there are hard bits like changing the picture of the Principal when they move on or retire.

Many schools close an eye to the out of date content on the website because the newsletter part is still working and that carries the news of the day.

Then one day, the person in the front office retires or moves to France to tend a vineyard. The password to get into the system that is etched in the departing person's mind is forgotten and when the new person turns up 6 weeks later and the first newsletter is due to go out, the website can't be accessed at all.

If that is not your reality in school then you are fortunate.

Why are school websites important?

Apart from keeping parents up to date with when the next swimming carnival and assembly is, it is a greener way of conducting a conversation with parents and even students. It serves as a recruitment vehicle, especially for remote or isolated locations and it can act as an easy to remember web address gateway into your student or staff "sealed area" where everything from class timetables to lunchtime duty rosters and even individual class sites that store information that students, teachers and even parents can view about their child's assignments.

So if they are useful, why are they like proverbial monkey on the back of many school principals?

They're not EASY, They cost MONEY  and they take TIME...Oh and most of them don't look that good anyway...

A marketing person once said to me - "Mark, there are three ideal characteristics of a meal, product or service that one receives - these characteristics are GOOD, FAST, CHEAP - but you can only ever expect to achieve 2 out 3 when make a purchase".

So, I wouldn't be talking about this if I didn't think we had a solution and the title of this blog post kind of gives it away, but I want to explain some of the rational for suggesting that SharePoint 2010 makes a good website solution for schools in the NT (and beyond - but I am staying focused).

Firstly, our education department has an enterprise license for SharePoint 2010, which means that every student, teacher and staff member can use SharePoint to create websites. Not that they will, but they are licensed to.

Our education department has an enterprise license for Microsoft Office 2010 and most of our students, teachers and staff members know how to use Microsoft Word and possibly even PowerPoint and Excel.

This is where we start to join the dots. SharePoint 2010 looks, feels and acts just like Microsoft word. It has a ribbon that provides you with commands for editing, saving, uploading and more. If our 3,000 or so teachers and staff are using the same web creation software which is paid for, which acts in the same way as your favourite word processor (also paid for) - then the knowledge and skills are the same regardless of which school you operate in.

Our schools have a fairly high turnover of staff, so the governance of passwords and access to the system needs to be robust. Having an ftp password provided without knowing how to retrieve that password or change it as it was locked to an individual is a roadblock to fixing up a website.

With SharePoint, you add folks to groups within a school, so there might be "allteachers" from Angurugu (a school on Groote Eylandt) added to the website contribution role. If someone leaves the school, their "allteacher" role is deactivated as part of the normal exit process and they no longer have access to the site. This works equally well for incoming staff - They are joined to the "allteacher" group at Angurugu as part of their recruitment and induction process and are therefore automatically added to the contributor role in the website.

Just because someone has a contribution role doesn't mean they can randomly add web pages to a site - with a publishing and approval process in place, you can limit what "goes live" to what you as the Principal or "webmeister" approves.

I have seen other Content Management Systems and am guilty of writing one myself, but unless you have and will retain a homegrown expert in Drupal, Joomla, Mysource, WordPress or the myriad of other CMS solutions out there - think strategically because the next teacher with ICT skills that turns is probably going to have Microsoft Word and SharePoint 2007/2010 experience before they will have experience in one of the aforementioned CMS solutions.

If your school (NT Education that is) is still handcrafting HTML pages with dreamweaver or frontpage, then contact me and we will put your school on the path to EASY web page updating for FREE in less than 3 hours of your TIME.

We are working with 25 school sites at the moment and through this process have identified common menu headings that schools choose for their websites and have worked out how to provide a simple style sheet so your site doesn't look the same as the next school's site.

While we are on that, many people who have used the SharePoint 2007 portal solution and have tried to create something that didn't look like SharePoint - and failed - don't worry. Take a look at the following sites (which are still under construction):

Also if you have read this far, I have place some guides to establishing SharePoint 2010 websites and customisation into our learning management system. These assets are public and no password is required to view them.

http://ourcourses.ntschools.net/course/view.php?id=820

This entry was posted on October 12, 2011 at 7:00 AM and has received 526 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.