|
New website will improve collaboration
Celeste ISD has released a new website designed to improve collaboration between teachers and parents. Parental involvement in their child’s education has been shown to be one of the most important factors in improving student achievement.
The new website makes it easy for faculty and staff to enter announcements, calendar events and information about classes, athletics and other extracurricular activities. You can check your student’s class pages for information about the material to be covered and, in many cases, daily lesson plans and announcements. Also look for the special section, How Parents Can Help, in each class.
In addition to course information, look for volunteer opportunities. You may be able to help even if your schedule does not allow you to be on campus.
The system supports newsletters for each class and extracurricular as well as blogs and RSS feeds for classes, staff and extracurriculars. Look for teachers using these capabilities to keep parents up-to-date.
There are plenty of benefits for students, too. For example, many teachers will be posting all assignments and handouts on the website. Gone are the days of “I lost the handout!” Some classes will also be making use of class wikis. Wikis are tools for collaboration. The most famous example is Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia built exclusively by collaborative volunteer effort. Each class in the new website includes wiki technology which students can use to publish reports and other findings for others in the class to see. This being a school environment, we have safeguards that Wikipedia does not have but otherwise, the technology is the same.
Finally, the website includes capabilities to support collaboration among faculty. It makes it easy for faculty to share information and to reuse and fine-tune lesson plans from year to year.
The site now has a more professional, more up-to-date look. That goes along with photos, slide shows, podcasts and other features that provide a richer view into what’s going on at Celeste ISD.
The key to a useful school website is lots of timely, informative content. Our new website makes it easy for faculty and staff to enter information and have it appear on the site without having to learn to program HTML and other web technologies. Faculty and staff simply fill out forms and the system takes care of formatting and publishing. Easy. That means that the webmaster’s job has changed. Instead of being the person responsible for putting everything on the site and knowing the technologies of the web, the webmaster is now more of a publisher, making sure that the content that needs to be on the site is posted to the site.
Our website and its content management system (the software that makes updates easy) is powered by School Site Manager.
|
Additional settings for Safari Browser.
