Getting students involved in school websites
Students of all ages can be involved in your international school website. You may wish to run an after school activity of club for your webmasters to make contributions to the website. Depending on the age of the children this could involve photographing events and preparing photographs for publication - or just helping to select and sort photographs. Others may be involved in writing copy for events that have taken place in drama or sport. Younger pupils may have a more passive role in the website but it can be a great motivational tool to see your work on the web and to know that your grandparents in Seattle or Southampton can see it too!
Teacher involvement
Teachers should have the opportunity to contribute to the website. This can take the form of an after school activity or in class work on a particular topic. Digital or scanned photographs should be easy to collect - getting written reports of events or activities may be more difficult but should be encouraged
Who is in charge?
You will need a responsible adult to oversee any student involvement and there are some pitfalls to be aware of in using students. As anyone who has ever supervised a yearbook production will know there is the temptation to have lots of pictures of your friends! You may have students who want to impose their aesthetics to the look of the website. Your school website is too important a resource to become a testing bed for student ideas (however interesting they may be). A better alternative is to give them access to their own page of pages on an intranet - to only be available within the school.
...read more about school intranets
Website management and students
A website with multiple contributors - especially if those contributors are children or young adults - can quickly become difficult to manage. You cannot afford to have pages, files and links spreading across your server. One solution is a content management system - which will still need to pay close attention to or you may use outside management from International School Websites. Ultimately you need someone who will manage your website content provision as well as the technical aspects of your website.
...read more about website management
...read more about content management systems
...read more about our website management offers
Let international- school-websites.com manage your school website.