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St Louise Primary School
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School details
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Whitehills Terrace
Murray
East Kilbride
G75 0NF
01355 230804
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Website contact
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Margaret Tracey
office@st-louises-pri.s-lanark.sch.uk
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Background
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South Lanarkshire Council is the fifth largest authority in Scotland. St Louise Primary Schools is one of the authorities 124 schools. The School was built in 1994 and it’s a bright modern open plan school. The Headteacher, staff, parents and pupils were all very keen to set up a website. Therefore, when the opportunity came up to be involved in the LTS National pilot for Scottish Schools to Get Online and examine good practice and web design we were keen to become involved.
On the 17 March, myself and another school from South Lanarkshire met with other schools from other authorities at Stirling Management Centre for a course led by LTS about web design. The focus was planning issues relating to web design and it became clear if time was spent on these issues the website would have more of a chance of being sustainable. It was clear that the schools website policy should include parent/child agreements and as Kelvinside policy covered most of the issues this was given to us to adapt. It was noted that the website should be sustainable and a group was more likely to achieve this. It was important to consult and discuss issues with the Headteacher, senior management and all staff that may be involved including support or admin staff, the ICT parents and the PTA Board. We had to decide a target audience and be clear about this before we set up the website, it could be pupils, parents, carers, teaching staff, potential parents, carers, the local community the world wide community and HMI. Any one of these could be your target audience if indeed you wanted it they could all be the audience.
We had to decide the purpose, whether it was to publish school work for the pupils, show their achievement, promote the school or promote communication links between the home, school and community. Planning was crucial. Here we had to consider who was involved, their training needs, resources, maintenance, the host of the site. We had to priorities what was going on the site. We had to consider the cost, the time and the security. Safety was a major issue and as such a lot of issues should be covered in the policy. We had to consider how to deal with images. We had to consider whether to have pictures of children at all or pupil or group pictures but no name and a distant view or pupils drawings with only their first name. It was clear no personal details of staff or pupils should be given and parental permission should be sought for children’s photos or work to be used.
Feedback facilities would have to be heavily monitored. Copyright would need to be considered and links offered to other sites. The site design was also considered. Careful consideration was given to navigation for each page should link back to the homepage. The homepage should show the menu and a link should not be more than three clicks away. It was also important to consider the page layout in terms of the heading, the font, the size, the colour, the download time and the amount of scrolling was definitely an issue with possibly a little vertical but no horizontal scrolling.
We viewed several websites for good practice and were given lists of links to some schools to take away as well as draft copies. We also received draft copies of “Managing a School Website”, “Safety Issues for School Websites”, “Principals of Data Protection”, parent questionnaires and examples of schools policy. Kelvinside being one of them. All of which could be adapted to suit the needs of their individual schools.
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Planning (April-May)
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On Monday 25 April I met with the Headteacher in our school and went over all the planning issues using the drafts received at the course. We also researched the list of websites. We considered the staff and pupils and by the end of the day we’d agreed on the staff and pupil members and went over the planning issues with them.
Possible parents helpers were discussed.
Later that week we meet to adapt questionnaires to be sent to parents about their ideas for the website. We had amended the Kelvinside policy to meet our own needs.
We prepared permission slips and invited parents to join the team. All paper work to be signed by parents was given out on the 9th or 10th of May on parents night to ensure a quick return. On the 12th of May the webteam met and reviewed the parent questionnaires and began work on the site layout and design. We drew up an initial plan of what we wanted and specific pages and began to collect data for each page. The team met again on 18th May and continued to collect data and began fine tuning how the pages should look.
On the 19th May, LTS held the second day of the course which was on actual web design. The Headteacher and myself went along with the data for our website on the iPOD that we had been collecting. By the end of the day we had been trained on using take2theWeb the web host. We were given a set of instructions on using take2theWeb. We used these to begin creating our own website.
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Producing (June- August)
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We set up the style for our website pages, created the home page with a banner and a link to the slideshow screen. We began to work on other pages. The plan of the layout made on 12 May was a crucial element to save time. We continued to gather data for our site and amended or added pages until the end of term with a view to starting work in earnest in August. Ninety percent of the uploading has been very straightforward. A couple of problems arose with the sizing of banners and graphics. We were able to overcome these.
Now, in the new term in August, we’re beginning in earnest and we’re having a meeting tomorrow. We did have a meeting through the summer where the iPod was discussed with LTS and there’s possible consideration for that. I think it’ll be a great tool to use to develop talking and listening skills, to record performances, perhaps powerpoint presentations and sharing them through podcasting.
On 29 August I met with parents and pupils to find out their initial thoughts on the sites. I recorded the interviews and am happy to share them with you.
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