Schooling is Not a Closed Book

We are in the early stages at the moment of planning ahead for next year, and revising what we currently have as a school web-page. This will require some inspired thinking from Jason Levy (Principal) and Christina Jenkins (Tech Coach), but I thought maybe someone else might have some suggestions. Please feel free to leave a comment suggesting what we might not have thought of yet.

New school website needs to

• either replace the wiki, or the wiki should be revised and embedded within the new school website
• have both general access and multi-level restricted access
• be comprehensive in terms of advertising and archiving everything that goes on within the school
• be versatile to fit with the other applications that we use most frequently
• be sustainable to warrant the time that would need to be invested in creating and maintaining it
• be practical/user-friendly to encourage high usage
• be tracked using site analysis application such as Google Analytics
  

Include school details:

• leadership team
• location
• mission statement
• history
• description
• newsletter (in the form of blog) through headline animator or RSS feed
  

Provide convenient external links to

• NYCDOE site and docs (ARIS, ACUITY, Learning Surveys, Progress Reports, SQR, test materials)
• iteach-ilearn
• united streaming
• atomic learning
• brainpop
  

Have a Students' Corner and Parents' Corner:

• Calendar with coming events
• Forum
• Focus for each month
• Celebration Pages
• shout outs
  

House our online teacher library:

• systems and protocols
• exemplar student work
• standards and performance indicators, curriculum maps, unit plans, lesson plans, online resources
• team meeting notes
• PD calendar
• PD resources
• school-wide data (Progress Report/s, SQR summaries, past NY ELA and Math results)
• grade-wide data (spreadsheets tracking common assessments)
• team-wide data

Include RSS feeds to:

• Hardlines - student newspaper
• Celebrations Pages
• Parenting blog/podcasts/voicethreads
• 339web
  
  
  If we end up using Google Sites, teachers will need to start using their CIS339online.org accounts to enable fast access into anything for which they have permission to view/collaborate.
  
  
  Ideally, parents should have access to curriculum maps, assessment schedules and rubrics.
  

More on Google Sites

I've spent some time creating sites and pages within Google Sites, and I think its potential for schools is huge. It's a shame that it only functions as part of Google Apps instead of a Google Account, but once you get past this, you can really start to create.

Take, for instance, the ability to insert any Google Doc, Spreadsheet, Presentation or Google Form directly on to a page:



Google Sites seems to have most of the same functions as other wikis, although you need to spend a little bit of time getting used to the different layouts if you're used to wikispaces or pbwiki.

Google Sites has the potential to be the main portal for any school, with new sites created within the one central site.

Google has a wiki!!!!

Kevin Jarrett has shared the most exciting piece of news about Google having a wiki: http://sites.google.com. For those schools like C.I.S. 339 that have embraced the rest of the Google Apps already, this development offers incredible new potential.
Watch the video.