How to get a schoolwebsite to prosper?

[cherchri]

Hi everybody!

Good to have a forum focused to school and education needs!
I work as teacher and as technical advicer / IT supporter at many schools. I want to give my schools a tool to
easily present their organisation on the web and to make more of their websites (community, etc.). I found in Joomla the software which provide all of this and even more.
But: Where and how to start?
I can setup a Joomla site within a few days, but how can a motivate teachers and parents to contribute?
Well, maybe someone can give me some general advice to that questions or - even better -

can name some well going Joomla School Website projects (links, contacts,..).

I want to do some research, hear some stories and opinions before I start all the work.
Thanks for the input!
cherchri

[steveoc]

Hi--

I started a school website in September and we have gotten off to a good start. There are a number of things that have helped our success.

• The power of "copy & paste": People throughout the school are typing up memos, fliers, announcements, newsletter articles, etc. all the time. I have convinced people to email these to me so I can paste them into the site. Once they see the value of their information on the Internet, it has been easy to get people willing to learn how to log in and paste the information into content themselves. Our Journalism teacher is just starting to require his students to submit their newletter stories to the school site as well.
• Photographs: We have made it easy for anyone to submit photos. If they don't know what to do, we let them hand us their cameras or cards and we take care of the rest. The librarian and I simply take their photos and ftp them to our server. A work-at-home parent volunteer resizes them and puts them back up into another folder that I batch into our gallery. Now some parents and faculty are learning how to use ftp to submit photos to be resized. Whenever there is a field trip or a special event, I make sure the cameras get signed out. Parents love to see pictures of their children. Noncustodial parents living far from their children love to see what they are doing.
• One stop information: By going to our homepage in the morning, parents can see the lunch menu, weather forecast, events for the , announcements such as school closings and the latest news.
• Enhanced communications with home and students: Many teachers have participated in having email sent to them through the site. Slowly, teachers are beginning to post course and homework information. More will be on-board soon as I am offering training sessions tomorrow.
• Targeted marketing to faculty: I send out notices targeting specific interests regularly. For instance, club advisors have become interested when I offered ideas for using the website to promote their fundraisers.
• Avenues for students to publish: Students are excited to find a way to publish on the Internet. We have public areas (joomla) and private areas (Moodle) for publication. Moodle allows students to try their hand at the technology with little or no risk.
• Opportunity for enrichment: Parents of our more advanced students relish the opportunity for their child to get enrichment through participating in the site.
• Timeliness: Get the material out quickly and keep it current. We generally have pictures and/or articles out the same day as the event.

These are a few of the items that come to mind. This is very much a work in progress and and I look forward to more implementations. The ball is just starting to get rolling.

I'll post more later.

Steve

The site: http://wellscsd.com

[compass]

OK, 10 year educator/administrator here.

Give each group a powerful reason to visit the site:

Parents:
Good
Find up to date information about the school
Better
Find up to date information about their child

Teachers:
Good
Post minutes/information about meetings
Better
Mitigate their communication burden to parents, students and other teachers

Students:
Good
Leverage the web as a tool to find content
Better
Leverage the web as a tool to make content

[cherchri]

Thanks for replying to both of you!

Thanks for the input! I'm going to find some strategies before I go online....

I keep you updated what ist going on with my project. But It will take some time. We'll start in Q2/2007.

Greetings
cherchri