It’s snowing. You may have noticed. All across the country schools are closed and teachers are going to enjoy a day off. But how does your school inform the parents?
Many schools this morning had trouble getting to the LA website for school closures as it was creaking under the demand. I did tweet about the issue the Hampshire website was facing and to give him credit, as always, @dfearnley was quick to say it was being looked into. We have 500+ schools so listening out for them all on the radio surely isn’t an option? So why aren’t more schools stepping up and taking responsibility? I wouldn’t even consider the LA noticeboard an option.
For us, it is all about our school website. This is where we direct parents to for information all year round, so why not now when it is snowing? Within 1minute of ‘the phonecall’ this morning, we had a page on our website full of snowy activities and information. Our parents also received a text message and email via Parent Mail.
So why doesn’t everyone do this? One thing that shocks me is that so few schools are able to update their own website. I spoke to a school yesterday that have to phone a technician to get it updated, that is ridiculous! Surely when you have a website/VLE or whatever, you need to make sure someone (everyone?) knows how to update it.
Who should be guiding these schools about their school websites? Is it the LA or the website company? Does anyone guide them at all? Why are they not manageable? Come on…have a look at your school and your website. Does it deliver for your parents when it really matters?
Couldn’t agree more Ian!
When I worked at Redlands I had to make do with just a normal web server with no databases. Just PHP and HTML to my disposal. It’s what every hampshire school get’s free. As you and I both well know to have CMS (Content management system) you always need a database, this costs extra money and also requires extra technical know how.
I could never persuade Redlands to levy up the extra costs to get a Database from Hampshire county council so I had to make do with what I had. I wanted a quick news system implemented that meant I or the admin staff or the headteacher could update the site within minutes from any device without the need for any HTML knowledge.
This is when I called upon an old piece of fantastic PHP script known as Cutenews http://cutephp.com/
This is a little PHP application which manages all the news on the front page of the redlands website http://www.redlands.hants.sch.uk as you can see the new technician used it to update the website effortlessly today.
It has 1 simple login screen, and that’s it. You’re logged in and you’d post news to the front of the website like you would this very blog. Title. Content. Extra content click publish and instantly the website is updated in a blink of an eye.
So next time you make the call to a technician to have the site updated, ask them to set up this free piece of open source software and if they go to charge you then hang up the phone, head over to http://www.schoolicthelp.co.uk ask me how to do it and I will post a full guide on setting up a cute PHP. I say for a beginner with and a good guide you’ll have it fully integrated in under 30 mins.
Brandon
Ian, this is exactly why we launched my school closures but schools only signed up after the snow started which was too late. My School Closures allows an embeddable website gadget/widget that keeps your site up to date with closure information. The problem is of course 99.5% of the time school is open so it’s waste pixel space. We have begun to address that, expect an announcement next year.
We still monitor and analyse closure info but we no longer offer a public service.
If you want any details see http://myschoolclosures.com – We may open it up again next year.
Ian we do exactly the same as you – update our website all the time with parent information – the twitter feed helps too. I had many positive comments about the speediness of updating parents through parentmail too.