WebedtecH

Before last school year we relaunched the web site for Coventry Christian Schools at educatingforlife.com. Over the coming weeks I’ll review the steps we went through to bring the new web site online and how it succeeded over the year. For a point of reference, with a school of slightly more than 400 students we generated almost 6,000 unique visitors and over 80,000 page views of content.

I’m outlining what we did to build our new school web site last year not in an effort to tell you to go build a new one for your school (although you’re more than welcome to) but rather to provide some insight and guidance as you go through producing any content on the web for public distribution. These guidelines can help you whether you’re building a district site, a school site, a class site, or even a personal blog.

Remember some key things about the typical school audience:

• They don’t have a lot of time to spare
• They are interested in specific information that is applicable to
  them (don’t make them read through the entire article about homework
  study techniques before realizing it’s only applicable to a certain
  grade or class)
• They will most likely not be checking your site on a daily basis

Step 1 - Gather your content

The axiom that content is king is never more true than with school web sites and information. People want to know what’s going on and who’s doing what. The web provides a fantastic, time-shifted (you’ll find I’m all about time-shifting) medium for people to keep in the loop. Whether you’re building a new site or redesigning an old one, perform an audit of your content. Look for:

• Content past it’s expiration date
• Changes in people, dates, or references (addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc.)
• Sensitive information (student’s first and last names, personal details, etc.)
• Relevant content

Once you have all your content gathered and audited, take a critical look at it from the viewer’s perspective.

• Is it work to read it?
• Is it engaging?
• Is it too long? (Most people, unless completely engaged in an article, are daunted by something that scrolls more than two full screens.)
• Does it make sense?
• Could it use some images / drawings / pictures?

Next…step 2…Put it where they can find it

Technorati Tags: ed-tech, blogging, web publishing, writing, content

Now here’s a good, practical example of putting a technology such as Google Docs to use in the classroom.

Techforlearning » 2007 » June
High School students learning to write resumes can easily be successful when using Google Docs and Microsoft Office Templates. After seeing one resume model and discussing formatting students can use Google Docs to brainstorm the sections of their resume.

Just a little test here. I wanted to see if the blog posting settings in Google Docs would work with Edublogs.org. Not that Google Docs is the best editor for blogs, but it doesn’t seem to suck either. Hopefully as the application continues to grow up the blogging functionality will as well.

Post note - Success! The post to blog function worked just fine the first time. Perhaps I’ll try this method for a while and see what comes of it.

Post, post note - Success is so fleeting. Here’s a tip. Use the MetaWebLog API if you want your document’s file name to transfer as the title of your posting.