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West End Primary School
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West End Primary School
Mayne Road
Elgin
Moray
IV30 1PA
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Contact
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Glenda Collis
01343 543161
Glenda.Collis@moray-edunet.gov.uk
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1. Training Day at Stirling
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Having spent some time looking at other school websites and briefly talking with staff, I had a rough idea of a skeleton for our site. Armed with a pen loaded with a variety of files from Word docs to Jpegs to PDF files, I headed to Stirling to create our Website. I was impressed with the potential of Take2theweb. Once you got into thinking 'rows and columns' and then browsing and finding the correct files, there would be nothing to it.
Not so simple! It took a bit of getting used to. You had to visualise what you wanted your page to look like. How many columns did you want for text or graphics? How many rows did you want? etc
Finding the pre-collected pieces of text and files was easy, especially if you were used to working with files.
The stumbling block was getting the graphics to stay where you wanted them to be! Another difficulty could have been dealing with the size of the files but thanks to John Smith and Take2theweb, that was not an issue.
At the end of the day, I did not leave with my website complete, but did leave with a Home page which I was impressed with. I also felt that, yes, this can be done. I really liked the fact that the Webpage could be altered and updated/added to from any computer.
Members in Web building team - 1
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2. Returning to School
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Luckily for me the next day was an INSET day. Even more lucky was the fact the Head Teacher had left a slot for me to fill in!
Keen and enthusiastic, I launched in to telling the staff the benefits of having a website and its potential. I cautiously proceeded with a short resume of my previous day's work and how easy it was going to be to get a website up and running... but volunteers would be needed to make it sustainable and kept up to date! By the end of the day I had 4 more members.
As a staff, we discussed potential issues such as using children's photographs. Should they or should they not appear on the website? We decided that, yes, they should appear but without names.
Members in Web building team - 5
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3. End of Term
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End of term was approaching fast and things were beginning to become rather hectic.
We did have a meeting of the now established Web Team. We looked at who our audience was going to be and therefore what we wanted to include on our website. Being a primary school, we wanted it to have the more 'child friendly' feel, giving each class (8 altogether) a space to showcase their work and celebrate their successes. As well as this, we considered the key areas of information which parents would want to find on a school website.
The permutations and possibilities could be endless.
With it being the end of term (and session), finding time was quite a challenge. The building of the website slowed down because we could see that a lot of the ideas and work we had planned would be outdated very quickly, and not justify the time used to put it in place. E.g. we had planned to put class photos on the website but they would be out of date by the beginning of the following session. This is something that will come up at the end of each year, but, hopefully, built in to our rolling plan.
I set about building the infrastructure of the Website putting on things which would not date with the new term such as policies/school statements.
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4. New Term -New Beginning
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Doesn't the middle of August come round fast!?
Six weeks later and here I was back at school ready for the new year ahead. But... there was a huge problem. I had forgotten the website address to access the working area. Easily solved by a quick e-mail to Margret. Thanks. I gave the 'team' a week's grace then called our first working meeting.
Fortunately, we have a classroom assistant who is very keen on workng with ICT and was willing to join our team. She is also involved with all the classes supporting the teaching of ICT. Perfect support for all the teachers who are a 'wee bitty' feared of Technology!
Our NQT was also very 'keen' and volunteered to join us too.
Members in Web building team - now 7!
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5. Let's get going
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Thursday 1st September
We gathered around an interactive whiteboard and had a look at the set up of Take2theweb. We had about an hour to try to come to terms with the basics of the programme. We looked at the beginnings of our site and I gave a demonstration of what can be done and how to do it. Each member of staff decided to take up the challenge of building their class' webpage. I printed off the "guide pages" which I was finding very useful and handed them out. The staff are now off and trying to build a page.
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6. Next Steps/Thoughts
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~ Remember to save. You will get timed out and lose everything - I learned the hard way!
~Help the staff in the team to build their page. (Checked the site and nothing added yet!) Offer on-going support to team members.
~Add more exciting Jpegs or Gifs to the site.
~Go ahead and publish what is done and then add to it as we go along.(Had thought of waiting until the site was fully built)
~Invite PTA and School Board to contribute to a page.
~Train the school's secretaries so that they can put Newsletters etc. straight on to the website and therefore make the site more informative and relevant.
~Try inserting tables (Keith Grammar's Ivor's trials may be useful to take into account).
~Set aside time to complete the pages already started and therefore will be able to publish them.
~Make sure work done on the website is done in managable chunks.
~...
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