Thursday, January 24, 2008

Looking for "great" school websites

Hi there,

I'm hoping that I can request a little bit of help from this awesome ISED
community -- I am attending a meeting tomorrow (Friday 1/25) morning to
deconstruct our current school website. We used one of the major Independent
School website vendors, and while the Development/Admissions folks are quite
happy with the external PR look and feel of our site, our intranet (with
portals for students, faculty, parents and alumni) has been incredibly
un-user-friendly, requires too much clicking and navigating for the
end-user, and is not so easy or intuitive for teachers who want to create
content for their class pages. Additionally, it has lots of limits in terms
of integrating with our email system, linking to blogs, and embedding Web
2.0 features and widgets (blogs, flickr libraries, etc.)

I've been given the homework of finding some "great" school websites. Based
on the shortcomings I've described above, do any of you have some good
examples you could send my way? Hopefully this might be useful to some of
the rest of you out there as well.

(I apologize for the cross-post...I posted this to the Classroom 2.0 and
ISENET Ning groups as well...)

Thanks so much,
Barbara Cohen, Educational Technology Coordinator
Marin Country Day School
bcohen@mcds.org
http://barblcohen.edublogs.org

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