Assignment 2

Assignment 2: In your blog, write your reactions to the websites you looked at. Some of the questions you could consider include:

• Is a website like this useful to a school district? A school website is incredibly beneficial to a school district. It is an easy and effective way to get information out to parents, teachers, and community members. By having an easy to navigate school website parents can find out what events are happening, when and where they are happening, what is being served for school lunch, how much money is in their child's lunch account, when school breaks are, and information about what their school board is doing. Parents and community members want to feel connected with the school their child is attending and be in the know as to what is happening. By having a school website it helps to clear up often times miscommunication or misinformation.

• Is it worth the time and effort to establish and maintain such a website? Yes it is definitely worth the time and effort to establish a school website, as long as it is serving the purpose the district wants it to serve. Websites need to be easy to navigate and provide the information parents and community members want and need. I work for the Yankton school district and we did a complete overhaul of our districts website a few years ago and now it is super easy to navigate for staff, parents and the community. We get quite a few comments on how thankful parents are to have all of the information readily available when they want to find it. As far as maintenance goes, once the website is establish as long as it is effective there should be little maintenance. If a district has to do an overhaul like we did it is going to take more time.

• What is the condition of your school’s website? Like I said in the question above, we redid our website a few years ago and it is awesome now. It is user friendly with links specifically designed for staff members, parents, students and community members. There is information about our district, about what events are happening and when they are happening, school lunch information, and school break information. It is also nice as a staff member because all of our school board information is also posted on our school website. As a staff member you can view all of the information discussed at the board meetings and be current on the things that are effective you.

• What information should be included in a school website? I think it is important to have information that is staff specific, student specific, parent specific, and community member specific. The website should include activities and dates, school breaks, what is being served for lunch, links to lunch account funds, school board information and anything else that is community specific that would be important to know. Another thing we used our website for the past few years was to get information out about the opt-out. Community members had a place to go to get information that was quick and easy to access.

• What role should the superintendent have with the school website? The superintendent should help in making decisions about what is put on the school website. As the head of operations it is important to get their opinion about what needs to be on there. I would look at the website in the view of a teacher but we also need to have the superintendents view, parents view, students view, and community members view. We are all going to have different information we want put on the website. All views should be taken into consideration.

• Should each teacher be required to have a link on the school website that contains information about their classes (such as assignments, web resources, etc)? I like this idea of teachers having a website that is linked so parents can view what is happening in their child's classroom. I know the issue here is time. Teachers have a million other things to do on top of having to maintain a classroom website. Not sure how you fix this issue, but I do like the idea of it!

• How can students be involved creating and maintaining a school website? I think the high school students taking a technology course could be involved in helping to maintain the school website. It would be awesome to have them involved especially in the student page and help create things that would be student specific. I think they should offer a class for credit where students get to work on the school website. It would also be neat to be able to post that on our website that it our creative students help maintain the website.