Your own website making machine Powerful and simple cutting edge networks of websites for schools HomeHome pageThe front page, the diary, the jumping off point for everything StoriesMain list of pages All our main pages, jump into who, what and why DiscussJoin our discussion group Come on in and start communicating those ideas, just join up or log in MembersA list of all our site members If you want to be anonymous with-hold your name, use something like Mickey Mouse, or Anonymous Coward Email usNeed to tell the webmaster... Get in touch straight away! If we need to we'll pass on your comments to the right person About usEverything about us Read more about who we are, and why we're doing this
We build and run sites for schools. Killer, kicking sites. Sites you'll love.
Site structure
Home
Create About
How much? What users say Legal Legals 4 kids More Stats Educational uses of blogs Bloom's taxonomy & blogs Case Studies Supporting the curriculum Lesson Plans Schools' banner ads Curriculum Online FAQs Thumbnail interface Group brains
Don't do this on your website
News Departments
Members
About us
We want to and will make it easy for schools to keep their staff, pupils, parents, partners, other stake-holders and wider community informed, updated and engaged.
Now, by merely typing in the text you can do it too!
It's so easy even 7 year old children can do it. If you are able to move a mouse, click a few buttons and string a few sentences together you can maintain a cutting edge site.
We'll give you all the training you'll need, support you on the phone or with email, all to make sure you get the best out of your investment.
Our killer features are:
Superb content management and blog software. Excellent Google optimisation.
An email to weblog interface, making updating your school blog a doddle.
Top draw support and feedback.
Try a demo or build your
Now, by merely typing in the text you can do it too!
It's so easy even 7 year old children can do it. If you are able to move a mouse, click a few buttons and string a few sentences together you can maintain a cutting edge site.
We'll give you all the training you'll need, support you on the phone or with email, all to make sure you get the best out of your investment.
Our killer features are:
Superb content management and blog software. Excellent Google optimisation.
An email to weblog interface, making updating your school blog a doddle.
Top draw support and feedback.
Try a demo or build your
30 day free trial
school website yourself. What will you write today's school news to be?Archive page for Thursday, 11 October 2007
Th, Oct 11, 2007Group brains
I'm going to reach out to all our schools, to all our ICT teachers. A pet peeve of mine is when my children come home buzzin' about a web site. "Can we use the computer, daddy?"
They can't spell it. They can't pronounce it properly. I can't find it in Google. We're all disappointed.
I see many emails going through our system asking for links. Here's one from yesterday:
Pushy parents? Whatever, they want to work at home there are thousands of pages out in the wild Internet that can help, but they need some direction.
So, this is what I propose. Each teacher adds a link to a site that they're working on to their school's site. A little description of the page and what age the class is. They add it to a new department called, "Home working."
Now, this is simple to do. It's called auto blogging, the teacher merely highlights some text on the page they want to link to. Hit a bookmark and viola... A new page opens, it's the new news item page, all the fields are properly filled in with the title of the page, link, the text you highlighted. All ready for you to edit and add some more text of your own.
The instructions on how to add a bookmark are on the pending news items page. (Editors only: ==> News)
This is super fast. My daughter's been doing it on her site. She's just turned 9.
But... And here's the cleaver bit. 20 schools, maybe 4 teachers in each school doing this, maybe twice a week. (I'd there'll be far more.)
That adds up to 160 links a week.
What I'll do is aggregate these links, and add box to the side of your front page which takes the most recent ones. I'll also add another page to your site which lists them all.
Thus, we've got some larger schools, some very small schools, some lazier schools, some busier schools. Some Welsh schools, Northern Irish, some inner cities with cultural differences, infants and primaries.
Each will have a fairly good set of links for parents and children to browse at home.
Remember, send them away and they come back more often.
Coming soon!
They can't spell it. They can't pronounce it properly. I can't find it in Google. We're all disappointed.
I see many emails going through our system asking for links. Here's one from yesterday:
Hi
Great web site, but it might be nice to put on it about the curriculum and ways you can help your child at home. I am keen to help my daughter to improve her school skills and any ideas would be gratefully received.
Libby
Great web site, but it might be nice to put on it about the curriculum and ways you can help your child at home. I am keen to help my daughter to improve her school skills and any ideas would be gratefully received.
Libby
Pushy parents? Whatever, they want to work at home there are thousands of pages out in the wild Internet that can help, but they need some direction.
So, this is what I propose. Each teacher adds a link to a site that they're working on to their school's site. A little description of the page and what age the class is. They add it to a new department called, "Home working."
;newWindow.focus())
Now, this is simple to do. It's called auto blogging, the teacher merely highlights some text on the page they want to link to. Hit a bookmark and viola... A new page opens, it's the new news item page, all the fields are properly filled in with the title of the page, link, the text you highlighted. All ready for you to edit and add some more text of your own.
The instructions on how to add a bookmark are on the pending news items page. (Editors only: ==> News)
This is super fast. My daughter's been doing it on her site. She's just turned 9.
But... And here's the cleaver bit. 20 schools, maybe 4 teachers in each school doing this, maybe twice a week. (I'd there'll be far more.)
That adds up to 160 links a week.
What I'll do is aggregate these links, and add box to the side of your front page which takes the most recent ones. I'll also add another page to your site which lists them all.
Thus, we've got some larger schools, some very small schools, some lazier schools, some busier schools. Some Welsh schools, Northern Irish, some inner cities with cultural differences, infants and primaries.
Each will have a fairly good set of links for parents and children to browse at home.
Remember, send them away and they come back more often.
Coming soon!
Email documents
Merely email in your Word doc, or in this case a rich text format (.rtf) and we'll do the rest.
As is usual there are some switches that are useful for you, certainly the [[department]] is one. I see Heads sending their letters to the [[notices Heads letters]] department.
The [front] or [pending] will also be useful for when you just want to post it to the front page and dash off home.
Or perhaps you don't want it on the front page. You want it to go into a normal web page, or as we say here, a story. Then, you'd use the [story] switch.
I like the captions under the flash document. But some wouldn't so the ever useful is the [nc] switch for no captions.
As you can see, one attachment is nicely formatted, with the text flowing around the flash document. I think it's always useful to add a bunch of text to your letters even if they are 'letters home,' and should stand up by themselves. IMHO I think it's a good idea to add a more personal note, perhaps about how the week has progressed, perhaps about the weather...
The flash document itself, should be self explanatory. There's a slider to enlarge, another button to 'size to fit,' another two to jump back and forward between the pages. One to print and one to open in another window. It's these two that are the most useful for the home reader.
The problem with uploading just the Word document is that some people don't have Word. With these flash documents, 99% of web surfers have the flash plug-in installed. So they can print!
So far the formats we support here are:
Keep your fonts simple! If you use a fancy, unusual font, we may not have it installed here. If you see some of your text replaced by weird characters, it's likely that this is the problem. Either tell us which font it is, and we'll install it, especially if you regularly use it, or change font to something more, more common.
The flash documents created are fairly large, in weight, in kilobytes. This means they slow down the user experience. Try to keep images to a minimum, pages as few as possible. Or...
Post them to a story page, with a link from a news item pointing to it. With this in mind I've created another set of switches! Don't worry, my next task is to make a cheat sheet, and I'll be mailing this out to each editor soon.
New switches
You want to create a story and a news item pointing to the story at the same time. Add [newsstory], [news story] or [news item story] to your subject field. If the last attachment is a document of some sort the new story will be created in the /letters/ folder or category in your site structure (the little green folders). If the last item is a picture it will be created in /pictures/myTitleOfMyStory. If it's a video, /videos/myTitleofMyStory.
But, if you want it to go directly into a category that's different to the above three, or even a new category, then use the switch with three, yes three square braces. Such as [[[whatever]]] which will create your story in the directory /whatever/ and the page's name will be taken from the subject line of your email. Thus, /whatever/mySubjectLine
The text of the news item is a little prosaic. But it does the job. The title of the post, again is taken from the subject line of the email (as is the story's title and the page's file name, see above). The text will be something like:
A new picture has been posted.
All this means, that you should save a lot of time putting stuff into your site. A lot of time! Me? I still like putting everything into the front page. But, I hear off some that they don't want 75 pictures in one news item. So, sure, this is going to save them a lot of time.
Word document: Megan's dyslexia homework
The [front] or [pending] will also be useful for when you just want to post it to the front page and dash off home.
Or perhaps you don't want it on the front page. You want it to go into a normal web page, or as we say here, a story. Then, you'd use the [story] switch.
I like the captions under the flash document. But some wouldn't so the ever useful is the [nc] switch for no captions.
As you can see, one attachment is nicely formatted, with the text flowing around the flash document. I think it's always useful to add a bunch of text to your letters even if they are 'letters home,' and should stand up by themselves. IMHO I think it's a good idea to add a more personal note, perhaps about how the week has progressed, perhaps about the weather...
The flash document itself, should be self explanatory. There's a slider to enlarge, another button to 'size to fit,' another two to jump back and forward between the pages. One to print and one to open in another window. It's these two that are the most useful for the home reader.
The problem with uploading just the Word document is that some people don't have Word. With these flash documents, 99% of web surfers have the flash plug-in installed. So they can print!
So far the formats we support here are:
- Word documents (.doc)
- Excel spreadsheets (.xls)
- Powerpoint presentations (.ppt)
- Adobe portable document formats (.pdf)
- Rich text format (.rtf)
- Text (.txt)
Keep your fonts simple! If you use a fancy, unusual font, we may not have it installed here. If you see some of your text replaced by weird characters, it's likely that this is the problem. Either tell us which font it is, and we'll install it, especially if you regularly use it, or change font to something more, more common.
The flash documents created are fairly large, in weight, in kilobytes. This means they slow down the user experience. Try to keep images to a minimum, pages as few as possible. Or...
Post them to a story page, with a link from a news item pointing to it. With this in mind I've created another set of switches! Don't worry, my next task is to make a cheat sheet, and I'll be mailing this out to each editor soon.
New switches
You want to create a story and a news item pointing to the story at the same time. Add [newsstory], [news story] or [news item story] to your subject field. If the last attachment is a document of some sort the new story will be created in the /letters/ folder or category in your site structure (the little green folders). If the last item is a picture it will be created in /pictures/myTitleOfMyStory. If it's a video, /videos/myTitleofMyStory.
But, if you want it to go directly into a category that's different to the above three, or even a new category, then use the switch with three, yes three square braces. Such as [[[whatever]]] which will create your story in the directory /whatever/ and the page's name will be taken from the subject line of your email. Thus, /whatever/mySubjectLine
The text of the news item is a little prosaic. But it does the job. The title of the post, again is taken from the subject line of the email (as is the story's title and the page's file name, see above). The text will be something like:
A new picture has been posted.
All this means, that you should save a lot of time putting stuff into your site. A lot of time! Me? I still like putting everything into the front page. But, I hear off some that they don't want 75 pictures in one news item. So, sure, this is going to save them a lot of time.
