Looking for examples of "great" school websites

I'm hoping that I can request a little bit of help from this awesome Ning community -- I am attending a meeting tomorrow (Friday 1/25) morning to deconstruct our current school website. We used one of the major Independent School website vendors, and while the Development/Admissions folks are quite happy with the external PR look and feel of our site, our intranet (with portals for students, faculty, parents and alumni) has been incredibly un-user-friendly, requires too much clicking and navigating for the end-user, and is not so easy or intuitive for teachers who want to create content for their class pages. Additionally, it has lots of limits in terms of integrating with our email system, linking to blogs, and embedding Web 2.0 features and widgets (blogs, flickr libraries, etc.)

I've been given the homework of finding some "great" school websites. Based on the shortcomings I've described above, do any of you have some good examples you could send my way? Hopefully this might be useful to some of the rest of you out there as well.

(I apologize for the cross-post...I posted this to the ISENET Ning group as well...)

Thanks so much,
Barbara Cohen, Educational Technology Coordinator
Marin Country Day School
bcohen@mcds.org
http://barblcohen.edublogs.org

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Permalink Reply by Erik Johnson on January 24, 2008 at 10:07pm

Well, I'll offer what I have. I am a TOSA in Solana Beach and my site is useful for for tech integration, but it's just a few months in it's creation. I think my district is doing well with site creation, however it's k-6 and is rather limited in the Web 2.0 applications. Please feel free to access the sites...good luck!

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Permalink Reply by Jeff O'Hara on January 28, 2008 at 7:58pm

Sorry this is a little bit late replying, but my collaborator in http://edmodo.com is the web designer and developer at http://www.kaneland.org (a k-12 school district in Maple Park, IL) and they have one of the best school websites i've ever seen. Their backend system he built for students, parents, teachers, & staff is even more impressive, but unfortunately I can't show you that.

-Jeff
http://edmodo.com

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Permalink Reply by Barbara Cohen on February 11, 2008 at 1:57pm

We do, indeed, host our site on a Windows server (so cool/creepy that you can detect that!) but it is designed and maintained by a vendor who specializes in website solutions for schools. I'd rather not name the specific vendor on this discussion thread, but I'm happy to have an offline (email) conversation with anyone who's interested.

Thanks for all the great suggestions/ideas!

Barbara
bcohen@mcds.org