What is a web site for education?

A. Web sites for education.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no single template for an educational site that will effectively meet the needs of every school. You can, however, break educational web sites into discrete functions: school sites and class sites.

• School sites
• Every school needs to post static, (primarily) non-interactive information.
• For example: location, contact info, upcoming events, athletic schedules, general announcements, info on classes and academic departments, newsletters, letters from top administrators, volunteer opportunities, etc.
• Most schools have (or want) a web site that they can use to disseminate information that is relevant to the school community.
• Essentially, a "school site" is the educational equivalent of a corporate identity site, with a little bit of town meeting thrown in.
• Class sites
• These sites are specific to individual classes, and contain info that is only relevant to students in these classes (or the parents of students in these classes).
• Sites can contain -- at minimum -- assignments, forums for group work, a place for students to hand in work, forums for class notes, etc. Class sites extend the classroom, and allow students and teachers to get feedback from each other outside of class time.
• As opposed to school sites, class sites require greater security -- at the middle school and high school level, students want to know (and their parents need to know) that student work/writing can't be browsed by some of the creepy individuals trolling the internet. This becomes less of an issue for college students, although security could still be useful to host multiple classes in one site.

While the structure -- and more specifically, the content -- of school sites will vary widely depending on the type of school, the class site has a more fixed set of basic needs. Virtually all classes have assignments, and most classes have a degree of cooperative learning. The challenge in designing a good class site lies in providing an organizational framework that simultaneously supports interactive learning without limiting the creative approach of students and educators. In short, neither the organizational structure or the functions of the class site should dictate educational methodology.

At present, I am exempting school and departmental intranets from this discussion. Intranets vary widely by school, both in how they are used and in how they are understood. Many intranets combine some of the functions of both school sites and class sites. As such, much that is said regarding the technical challenges of building school and class sites also applies to building a useful and secure intranet.

B. Using one web site as a school site and a class site.

School sites and class sites are two very different beasts. For reasons related both to security and ease of site administration, I recommend keeping them separate. But, more on this in later posts.

Next: School Sites