Using j2bloggy and j2webby for public websites

Schools are so much more than corporate businesses, so I’ve always believed that school websites should be more than merely informational or brochure driven.  In fact, whenever I review a school website, the first thing I look for is the contribution made directly by the pupils.  After all, a school website should reflect the whole school community, should it not?  School websites need to look professional, but they also give us an opportunity to walk-the-talk, showing how pupils in our charge can engage with the digital world in an authentic manner. 

This is one reason that I have supported the idea of using the j2e platform to provide school public websites as well as the secure learning platform.  In j2e, the natural authoring medium is the web page, not the paper page.  This allows us to support literacy and digital progression for pupils by:

• increasing the range of media being used;
• introducing interactive facilities;
• developing language skills for purpose and a sense of audience.

The j2e platform provides simple ways that pupils can author work in safety, then with the permission of their teacher, publish this to the school site.  In this way, I hope that schools in Powys can provide pupils with an exciting way of addressing authentic audiences (even if it is mum and dad/carers in the first instance!) and demonstrate just one way in which we really do try to ‘fulfil the potential of every pupil’.

So I am hoping that over time, pupils can make increasing use of their school websites.  Initially this might be to simply demonstrate the breadth of great work already going on in our classrooms.  But let’s hope this extends to include the work of extra-curricular clubs and the School Council, and may then extend still further into interactive content such as e-Safety surveys, games and well, whole new websites in themselves.

Indeed, in a few years I hope that the school websites themselves will have been redesigned by the pupils and look nothing like at present.  Now wouldn’t that be a meaningful demonstration of our pupils’ talents?

By way of introduction to the new j2bloogy public sites, I have prepared a short training pack at Managing a j2bloggy Public Website (docx).  However, the j2bloggy websites are based on WordPress, used the world over to build blogs and websites of all-sorts.  A brief search on the internet will generate further help to supplement this limited introduction.