How we made our Website

Making a School Website

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Introduction by Mandy Barrow

Woodlands Junior School in England first started publishing on the internet back in 1999. It seems such a long time ago now as so much has happened since then.

When I started I didn't really have any master plan. Not many schools had their own web site and a survey I conducted at school showed that only 53% of parents had internet access at home. I wanted to create a presence for the school on the internet.

The Woodlands website has change and grown over the years.
Click here to see past screen shots of our website

Getting started

The website consisted of only a few pages to start with. I created pages for displaying the school prospectus first. After the school bought a scanner and a digital camera, I was able to scan some of the students’ artwork and take photographs of school life. The best of these were then put onto the internet in the newly created classwork pages.

I decided to add some games to our website to attract more visitors and to entertain our students in the evenings. Other pages soon followed including Homework Help, Teacher Zone, Cool Links, Jokes page and a Maths Zone.

Getting the Students Involved

Once I was confident I started to involve the students more. A small group of Year 6 worked together to produce the first Woodlands student website, which gave an insight into school life through the eyes of the students.

Later, I let more students produce their own homepages during their computer lessons. At first these were only a basic page with a brief introduction about themselves and their family. Then, as I became more ambitious, I let the students create their own mini web sites using Macromedia Dreamweaver, software used by many of the big companies.

The web sites they created were made by using a set formula:

Introduction,
My Family,
My School,
My Holidays,
My Diary,
My Hobby.

So, every student had the same six page web site but it was up to them to create their own style.

A small group of students became really interested in making web sites so I gave them an opportunity to help create and update pages on the main website. I found there was a hole in the market for good child friendly websites about England and so decided to fill the gap by creating our own pages on English Culture.

The Benefits

The students have benefited greatly from this experience. The internet is an easy medium for them to express themselves. It is similar to publishing a book, though obviously we are the publishers and we can write what we like. The students love it when they get positive feedback when people write in their guest book or send them an e-mail. It is also an excellent opportunity for them to use English in real life situations.

The school often receive letters and postcards from students around the world. Some of these are just asking questions about life in England, whilst others are looking for pen friends. This has given our students a great insight to life in other countries as well as identifying where each country is in the world.

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