Are you thinking about establishing
a web site for your school, or are you planning to
update your existing site? Are you having a hard
time getting past HTML and FTP and all of the other
acronyms that seems to such and important part of
the Internet. Community
Publishing might be the
solution.
Many of you here in North Carolina know of Frank
Daniels III. He, along with his family, owned
the Raleigh News & Observer until it was sold a
few years ago. You may also know that while under
Frank's Stewartship, the N&O was the second
major newspaper in the country to publish on the
World Wide Web. Upon selling the N&O, Frank
combined forces with a couple of top-notch
programmers from Greensboro to start a company
called KOZ, Inc.
KOZ offers to its clients (in most cases,
free with advertising) a web page service that is
truly unique. They call their service, Community
Publishing. It is based on two fundamentals.
- The publisher's focus should be on content
and not on code.
- Web sites that involve a community, should
be a community affair.
In other words, the people are doing the
communicating should not be distracted by the
programming and they shouldn't have to siphon their
content through a central web master. For
those of you who have never published a web page,
it works like this.
- You type the content, or text, into a word
processor.
- Then you insert a lot of little codes,
called HTML tags, into the content to
format the text. Formatting means anything from
making word bold or italicized, to indention, to
where you want the text or pictures to appear on
the web page. Click
here to see an example of web
tags or code.
- Finally you have to FTP (File Transfer
Protocol) the files up through the Internet into
your web server.
Now it really isn't all that difficult,
especially after you have done it a few times. But
the fact remains that all of the time that you
spend dealing with acronyms and computerese is
happening at the expense of your message.
KOZ solves this by giving the chore of coding
and uploading to a powerful database. You
simply chose the look or layout that you want, fill
in the blanks with content, and you have a web
page. It all becomes part of the database
which then builds your web page on the fly each
time someone accesses it. Because the content
resides in the database, you or your designees can
remove, edit, or add content to the page at any
time from any Internet connected computer.
Since there is no HTML or FTP training required,
your entire teaching staff and many of your
students can participate in building a growing a
dynamic web site that servers your school
community.
As an example, completing this
form:
produces this web page
Click the
image to See the Real Web Page
With web publishing this easy, any
principal, teacher, or student who can load a web
page into a browser can publish content on the web.
If one of the goals for your web presence is to
provide up-to-date information for all of the
customers of your school, then the easier you make
it for the largest number of information provides
to publish that information, the more likely you
are to succeed.
Security? Who's
Minding the Store?
This is an important consideration.
One of the problems of the Internet today is the
fact that nearly anyone can publish there. We
find that we have to learn to evaluate web-based
information (see
Goals-Based
Evalution...). You have to decide
who should be empowered to publish on your school
web site and what oversight needs to be
established. Community Publishing solves
this problem by giving the web site administrator
the power to set who can publish on your web site
and who can even see your site.
For instance, if one of your classes has its own
pages on the school site, the teacher can set the
pages so that only her students can publish there.
She can also set the pages so that when a student
does add content, the teacher will be notified (by
e-mail) and will have to read and approve the
content before it goes public.
The teacher might also have web pages set so
that only her students can use them, and only her
students. She can set those pages so that they
would not even appear on a menu to the casual
surfer. Only here students would see them and click
into them.
What About this
Community Thing?
KOZ believes that the web should
facilitate community, but not just a community of
content providers. They believe that your
information customers should also be able to
interact with your organization through your web
site in a way that builds community. For this
reason, KOZ sites include interactive features such
as
- discussion forums so that parents and other
school stakeholders can post comments and carry
out online discussions;
- chat rooms, where our teacher can switch on
her class' chat room, invite another class from
England to come in and collaborate with her
students, and then switch the chat room off when
the session is over;
- feedback forms so that schools can seek
opinions and other information from their web
readers; and
- perhaps the most impressive feature is the
online calendar. With an easy to use calendar
interface, parents and other school stakeholders
can either browse through events or use a search
tool to search the entire calendar for events
with a specific keyword. Imagine parents being
able to pick up their children's homework
assignments each night on their classroom
calendar. Imagine teachers being able to share
assignments and comments to all of her
Internet-using parents simply by filling in a
web form.
Spawning Web
Sites
One of the most interesting features
of Community Publishing is the ability to
spawn web sites. This means that when the school's
site has been established, separate but connected
sites can be spawned for the
- atheletic department,
- the guidance office,
- the student council,
- each classroom, and
- the PTA (which would be maintained by PTA
members).
Because separate but connected sites can be
spawned from the school site,
- school sports schedules can be published on
the sports calendar with scores and highlights
of past games,
- examples of student work can be included on
classroom web sites and private chat rooms can
be established where students can discuss
English literature with a scholar in Cambridge,
England,
- the PTA board of directors can carry out
online meetings through their discussion forum
which only they can read or write to,
The
Downside
I have painted, up to this point, a
very rosie picture of Community
Publishing. The fact remains that, in a
sense, it is software, and often people have to be
trained to use new software. The KOZ
publishing system is an information environment,
and many people (especially technology reluctant
people) will need a guide.
Also, even though KOZ provides a large number of
layout templates to choose from, there are limits
to the look you can give your pages. But for
those of you who do know HTML and want more
distinctive looking pages, most of the forms that
you enter content into will also take HTML so that
you can customize your format and layout.
What Does This
Mean?
I have been teaching teachers and
other educators how to build web pages for many
years now. I have preached in each of these
workshops that a school's web site must be a
reflection of the culture of that school. It should
not be forced into a mold to conform to the same
look as all of the other pages in the district. It
is too good'an opportunity for rich communication
between the school and it's community.
I also preach that a school's web page must be
more than just a billboard on the information
highway. It should be dynamic and interactive. It
should be up today and should feature information
on all aspects of the school's workings and
culture.
I believe that Community Publishing
offers an acceptable solution to satisfy both of
these rants. It would be nice if all of us
could perform HTML...it would be nicer if we had
time. It would be nice if even all of the
teachers who have taken my workshops were building
interactive and constantly updated web pages.
But I can't say that they are.
KOZ has done the layout for you....lots of
them. You choose. You compose and
polish your content and then paste it
in. His "Submit" and you're on the Web.
KOZ has a separate service called Schoollife for
educational web publishing. They provide free web
publishing for schools (with discreet advertizing)
and will be offering educational content for
students and teachers.
For more information about KOZ and Schoollife:
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