School websites are not about schools

They are about people. This was the message I was keen to get across to around half the ICT Coordinators at last night's get together in Prestonpans. Kudos to them for making it there on the first Monday evening of winter (it was dark by the time we started) and making it home in one piece after an interactive, challenging hour.

I asked three questions about web presence and the coordinators, the people responsible for the use of ICT in their school from admin tasks to creative educational uses, put their views across after some discussion. After each point of discussion I did a bit of an overview of the possibilities a blog or a wiki could offer to meet the needs that they had expressed (luckily my telepathy was working well last night - four years of looking at what people want out of websites has its advantages ;-)

What do schools do online now?
Websites tend to be run by one webmaster and are therefore a nightmare to update. They present information from teachers to (normally) parents. In some instances there are already some weblogs up or simple webpages where children's best work is presented and some even share their learning experiences. Where children are building their own websites and learning about this process there is a way around the sustainability issue - but this is a situation difficult to replicate in many schools.

Wikis
Wiki is hawaiian for quick and is a web tool that matches this definition. I presented an examples of a wiki that is used for simply getting information online in the quickest possible way. I also showed a nice example of collaboration over a longer period of time to plan a podcast (radio show) and to plan an event or policy. Coordinators liked the idea that, as long as you can use Word, you can probably get publishing straight away.

There wiki software I like best has been Wikispaces. You might want to create one web address for the school and have pages come off that or you may create a wiki for each project as it comes along. It's not that important, since you can always link things up later.

What would you like your school's online presence to do?

Teachers want some familiar things:

• to display student work
• something that can be updated easily, by anyone anywhere
• something where the kids' uploading can be checked off by a teacher first
• something that helps make links with other people in your cluster, local authority, interest area
• something where uploading large audio or video files is easy - no space problems
• collaboration with other teachers is easy to spot on the horizon
• A snapshot of what is going on in the school at any one time

My job here was going to be easy...

Blogs
Weblogs allow you to do all of this, especially using the system which we will launch in East Lothian this coming month. I showed how quick and easy it is for me to post to this blog - they liked, I think. In later discussions I pointed out that GoogleVideo is a resource we have started to use for short videos and that Veotag might be handy to split up longer clips into something more manageable to view. Using either of these tools gets around the storage space issue, but we also host Typepad blogs which come with generous space if you want to keep video quality higher.

Other than doing what existing school websites do, blogs allow more in-classroom use of the web to compliment student work and make them think harder while they are in - and out of - the classroom. Example: improving writing through paragraph-by-paragraph writing, commenting and rejigging (In this example the student has gone back since her Standard Grades and has started doing more work for her Higher exam, this time using only the support of her blogging community).

Can we work smarter?
I am still convinced that we waste inordinate amounts of time in school. Some of this can be saved by using ICT effectively and making it part of the learning process rather than a glossy end product. The best tool anyone getting into the two technologies mentioned could use would be aggregation - a tool which brings all the information you like to you, instead of you having to go and get it from a million and one websites. Using Bloglines to add 'feeds' (the links contained in those wee orange buttons with 'RSS' written on them) is a great way to do this, but still beyond many novice users likely experience. So, in East Lothian we are starting to aggregate things for people, and making that available, too, in a format which more advanced users can pop into their feed reader. The big ambition - to get more students using RSS feeds in their studies.

In the meantime, just reading one or two blogs once or twice a week might help inspire your classroom practice or give an idea that saves you hours. In this connected world we do have to speculate to accumulate.

East Lothian's web presence launches end-November.