Illinois Education and Technology Conference

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Website Strategy Identity, Transparency and
E-business

• Nathan Pedretti
• Independent Website DeveloperNorth Chicago CUSD
  187

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BIG PICTURE
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In simple terms

• Rally all of your community resources (people,
  programs, processes) to help students achieve
• Soyes, were talking about websites, but
  websites that help lead the school improvement
  process and ultimately help kids learn.

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Domains of Research

• Focus on Students
• Focus on Teachers
• Focus on Leadership

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Website Strategy

• Focused on
• Improving leadership effectiveness
• Centralized decision-making
• Decentralized (empowering)
• Creating a plan to highlight and promote people,
  programs, and processes
• Reusing existing communication materials

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Why websites?

• Your website is the de facto reference for your
  school
• Lots of other sites talk about your school, but
  only your school site tells your side of the
  story.
• Your website should be one of your primary
  community relations tools

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Seven things to do today

• Put more photos online
• Update your staff information
• Show off your calendar of events
• Highlight your programs
• PDF your newsletters and get them online
• Use Google Analytics (come to SEO)
• Create simple update policies
• Use your website as a reference source
• Update your email signature

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Three Phases

• Three big phases in building school websites
• Identity People, processes, and materials
  (centralized process)
• Transparency using tools to create personalized
  views of school information (decentralized
  process)
• E-business using technology to transform
  processes

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Unique Identity

• What makes your school unique?
• People (students, teachers, parents, community
  members)
• Programs (academics, electives, extracurricular,
  clubs/organizations, recognition)
• Processes (methods for achieving success,
  knowledge management)

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Building a unique identity

• Lets keep it simple
• Look and Feel colors, graphics, logos
• Photos of students learning /engaged in activites
• Staffing Information
• Newsletters / Announcements
• Calendar of Events
• Programs (academics, electives, extracurriculars,
  clubs/organizations, recognition programs)
• Policy documents
• Special Event Spotlights

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Annual Updates

• Late Spring
• Bring a focus group together to discuss the look
  and feel of your site logos, colors, major
  sections. Make simple, concrete recommendations.
• During the Summer
• Technology team implements recommended changes,
  your site is ready for the fall.

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Semester Updates

• At the beginning of each semester (August,
  January)
• Update your staffing information / contact
  information
• Update your list / summary of programs (academic,
  elective, extracurricular, clubs/organizations,
  recognition)
• Focus on how to get involved, why to get
  involved, and any deadlines show photos of
  people having fun/learning.

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Semester Updates

• Semester updates (continued)
• Policy Documents
• Student handbook
• Teacher handbook
• District policies
• School Improvement Plan
• Technology Integration Plan
• Target Learning Goals
• Discipline Plan

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Monthly Updates

• Each month (August June)
• Newsletters (PDF / full text)
• Calendar of events
• Program Photos
• Photos are the primary driver of traffic to your
  website. Put fun and learning front and center.
• Special Event Spotlight / Recognition

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Rootbeer float party (AR Recognition)
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Network Effects

• A network effect is a characteristic that causes
  a good or service to have a value to a potential
  customer which depends on the number of other
  customers who own the good or are users of the
  service.
• Wikipedia, http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_ef
  fect

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Consistent, Steady Updates

• You need to invest at least one year of
  consistent, steady updates to build a school
  website that has value to the community.
• KEY Use this update schedule to provide the
  structure you need to ensure consistent, steady
  updates.

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Part II Transparency

• Transparency is an openness about sharing
  information about your schoolgood and bad.
• Without a high degree of transparency, you limit
  the effectiveness of school leadership to
  problem-solve and improve.
• Your team must be comfortable with email to move
  forward

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How to build transparency

• Implement tools that allow users (teachers,
  students, parents, community) to share what they
  know about the school.
• Staff profiles
• Announcements
• Calendar of events
• Forums
• (Email Newsletters)

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User Authentication

• To make these sharing tools work, you need to
  ensure that people are who they say they are
  online.
• Dreamweaver User Auth
• PHP Zend Framework
• Windows Sharepoint (Frontpage extension)
• Your developers should know how to implement a
  basic user auth system.

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Profiles

• Allow users (staff, teachers, students,
  volunteers) to share information about their
  interests and background
• Build communities of people with common interests
• Use interests and backgrounds to develop human
  resources to tackle difficult problems

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Announcements

• Allow users to announce programs and events
  important to them and their community
• Empower users to advertise their own events,
  promote programs of importance to them
• Create a more vibrant view of the people,
  programs, and processes that make your school
  unique.

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Calendars

• Allow users to add their events to school wide
  calendars
• Improve ability to plan and schedule
• Let people make decisions about what to attend,
  value judgments about what is important
• See the vibrancy of your school community
• Keep it simple date, time, event, contact

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Forum

• Create an open discussion space for all types of
  issues, problem solving, and brainstorming
• Most forum software allows for public/private
  forums for open or discrete topic discussion.
• This is invaluable for problem-solving,
  improvement planning

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(Email Newsletter)

• Use a trusted email newsletter provider to create
  customized email announcements to groups in your
  community
• mailChimp www.mailChimp.com
• Constant Contact www.constantcontact.com
• Only use opt-in lists
• These services charge fixed rates for large
  volumes of emails

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Part III E-business

• Streamline your school processes by moving more
  services online
• Large market of data service providers SIS, STI,
  Powerschool, SASI/XP
• Increasing need for small niche process
  improvements like
• field trip request forms
• requesting time off
• community use of facilities

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Personal Advertising

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Analytics,
  routing, and your school
• Friday, 930 am, Plaza B
• More details about optimizing your website, using
  analytics tools
• Meeting Expectations What your community expects
  to find online
• Friday, 1245 pm, Capital III
• Communication planning

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PPTs available

• On my website http//www.nathanpedretti.com/
• Or, you can give me your card and Ill email them
  to you.

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Seven things to do today

• Put more photos online
• Update your staff information
• Show off your calendar of events
• Highlight your programs
• PDF your newsletters and get them online
• Use Google Analytics (come to SEO)
• Create simple update policies
• Use your website as a reference source
• Update your email signature