Just inherited our school's website... what should I replace frontpage with?
Yep, that's right. Our school webpage is currently still using frontpage for all of the school and teacher pages. It's out of date, obnoxious to use, and just flat out not a good way to do things anymore with so many quality cms solutions.
So what is everyone using these days? From what I have found out, the tech coordinator is not wanting to give server access to teachers for updating their sites on their own. They want to be able to check it over first before publishing. As of right now I am thinking along the lines of Wordpress MU and setting the teachers to contributors. Thoughts?
So what is everyone using these days? From what I have found out, the tech coordinator is not wanting to give server access to teachers for updating their sites on their own. They want to be able to check it over first before publishing. As of right now I am thinking along the lines of Wordpress MU and setting the teachers to contributors. Thoughts?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Adam Provost on
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FrontPage is a nightmare. Been tinkering on school web pages for a bit. Proprietary coding, CSS nightmares... yuck. Here's what we do:
DreamWeaver for conventional static (brochure style) pages. Templates and menu system from ProjectSeven.com (css compliant, no headaches and incredible support for $79 each). We modified the colors and applied our logo.
'Daily Announcements' and 'News and Updates' on two separate blogs from blogger.com. The blogs can be updated via email so it's easy for the right people to publish. Cafeteria updates lunch menus, daily announcements by the main office and athletic updates from the athletic dept. All updated to the blog via email and I don't have to touch it ! School cancellation announcements can be easily posted via email too. Saves all the security headaches and proprietary software issues for all your dynamic content.
Syndicate news and updates to feedburner.com (which Google now owns) and use the tools there (publish) to create 'news snip' style stories to your schools home page. Feedburner gives you the code to pop in a table and the stories load into your home page from the blog. Creates a nice effect that lots of businesses and universities / colleges are using on their home pages.
We use the photo album creation tools in dreamweaver to build albums with lots of pics - unlike some other engines. Never could understand posting a photo album from a school event with five pics ! Some of our albums have over 50 pics. Automated creation tool. Easy after the first few runs.
Got the Google search box for free and use google analytics to give us great traffic feedback. All free.
One copy of DreamWeaver, two modules form projectseven (which integrate into dreamweaver) - 2 at $79 each. All other tools free! Sure beats the $25,000 quote we got from a design firm to do just about the same thing.
We directed all faculty to blogger and wikispaces as they saw fit and created a link page on our site. The training for all faculty took 1 hour. Intuitive, and both sites have great help files. We trained three students to help thos four of five individuals who needed more help. Allows people to be creative, update from anywhere. All free. We lobbied to allow people to be creative instead of controlling what everyone published. The rationale I used was that we trust teachers to educate students in classrooms and we need to trust them to publish their course content too.
I looked at going straight blog ala wordpress but this hybrid approach fits our needs currently. Keeping the dynamic content easy to update... is key.
Might help and might not. Good luck !
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Permalink Reply by Scott Walker on
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Great stuff.. Share the link if you get a chance. I would to see what you have going.
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Ok, question three.... and hopefully all of you will continue to contribute as it appears that everyone is learning from what other schools are doing. Collaboration at it's finest! :)
For those using things such as blogger, wordpress and so on for teacher pages. What settings are you using for teacher pages?
Are you setting them as contributors and publishing is left up to an administrator?
Are you giving them free reign over templates and plugins?
The reason I ask is that I have heard that there are some that are reposting common templates but putting malicious code in them. This could be bad news for the technology novice who finds a cute template or nifty plugin from some random site and decides to upload it only to find later that it leaves the whole site vulnerable.
By the way, I love the idea of allowing posting via email. Sounds like something simple enough that are food services, librarian, and various administrators could do.
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We let the teachers who use them decide. Some are comfortable with collaborating online and others want to use blogs and wikis as more static publishing. Letting everyone pick their template (look and feel) sparks interest for the creator and for the students.
Choosing templates in blogger is a safe route as is wikispaces. People can pick a template and adjust colors and includes as they see fit. Blogger even has predefined snapins now like surveys and mail to.
I'll tell you, posting by email is fantastic. It took all the hassle out of conventional publishing methods. Quick and easy for busy folk. We have more and more athletic teams posting sites using blogs and wikis too.
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This one will be fun to follow:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/google-sites-to-launch-nex...
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Permalink Reply by John Puskar on
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As a tech coordinator, I'll agree with the over burdened comment, underskilled however????? Aw, I guess I'll let that one slide.....no seriously, the problem is the difficulty of training teachers with varying level of technical understanding.
Much like the dilemma that you all face when confronting a class of gifted, average and learning support students all in the same class and you need to get them all to the same place by testing time. There just isn't enough time to help everyone and brief "staff development-style" lessons just don't cut it.
The true question here is this: what kind of money are you able to spend? We tried for years using web-editors like frontpage and dreamweaver and golive.....we've used them all, templates too....but the real power comes in distributed authoring. If multiple users can't contribute the content, somebody's going to be overworked (and underpaid ;) ) We have gone from a stagnant, and broken site that we've struggled with for years to a clean and consistent dynamic site in a matter of days. We are using a hosting service called schoolwires. It is eligible for ERate, which the administrators will know what that means, and it is probably about as cheap as buying licenses for frontpage or dreamweaver for every single user. They can be found at http://www.schoolwires.com and you can see our site at http://www.southmoreland.net
I am in no way affiliated with them and have absolutely nothing to gain from promoting them. I am just sharing my experience with others. It is also worth mentioning that there are probably other similarly styled solutions out there. I think what makes this a good fit is the ability to manage content with approval paths where you need it, and that it is all web-based editing that can be done from anywhere.
Good luck,
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Wow! Thanks John! Question about ERATE. From what I know about it, basically they have a few restrictions and if you abide by them they provide you with some funding. My question is this. Currently we have our school website on our schools server. If we opted to host it on an external server, would this disqualify us? If so would we still lose funding if we just did the teacher pages on an external server and left the school site on the school's?
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Scott, You should be fine....but just to be sure, check out the guidelines here.....
http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-07-182A2.pdf
Also, http://www.universalservice.org/ is the place that contains all the ERate info that you should need.
My understanding is that as long as it is a hosting service for a web page (content you provide) and not a software application or other services like streaming content or web conferencing, then it should be eligible.
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Permalink Reply by ROLLY MAIQUEZ on
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I've tried Wordpress, Drupal, Moodle (as a school website/CMS), Dreamweaver, and a few others ... my favorites are Mambo and Joomla. I have been using Mambo since version 4.x something I think. I have been using Joomla since version 1.0 I have helped other educators / school to set up their own sites using those. Now I have gone to the JOOMLA side entirely -- especially with 1.5.2 -- beautiful -- wonderful interface - very easy to manage. :)
My school's website is currently in Mambo (old version) -- I will switch it over to a faster server and into Joomla 1.5.x (whatever it is by then) in summer 2008. Can't wait! Time to clean up and re-design! I might use the JS Education template from Joomlashack.
Just my recommendation ... :)
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