Stratford Primary School

Yay, after a year puzzling Kerry and I finally worked out how to use the school Intranet. All you need is an index.html page saved in the right place & voila you have a 'front end' - web interface instead of seeing a load of directory files. Don't follow that - no matter - you have to see it in action to understand. We have spent 3 days working with a team of Y8 students creating webpages for their class page. These pages are to showcase the what is happening in their classroom. The children brainstormed ideas for appropriate pages then chose the ones they thought most relevant - Our Work, Art Gallery, Sports & Events + the Home Page. They discussed a design theme but once they got started on individual pages the theme went out the window as the kids experimented with banners, colours, buttons, linked pictures & shapes - so every page was very different. They looked at other school sites for ideas - & I didn't tell them (honestly) the first site they looked at was Toko School! One student was straight into Paint trying to create a road sign that he could cut up into Hotspot links from FrontPage - this didn't eventuate as he got frustrated with his Drawing skills & opted the easy way into Frontpage buttons. The hard lessons learned were in File Management when on the second day one of the students overwrote the home page with his own page & it was completely lost. We had an interesting discussin on using mistakes as learning experiences :-) The children were enthusiastic about using their Intranet pages as a media to publish their work and communicate with the school. They were wanting to take it further and publish to the web where they would have a wider audience. This would be the logical next step and easy to do through SchoolZone hosting. Now the structure has been set up and some skills learnt, the challenge for Kerry is to keep the enthusiasm going and continue to make opportunities and time to publish to the school through their pages.