Case Studies

Click on the School name hyperlink to view the actual school's website! And visit our front page blog to catch up with our own daily ramblings.

Beechdale Primary School, Walsall

Design
The design has yet to be finalised. We’re awaiting new logos resulting from a possible change in school name.

Editors
Managing Editor: Mark Wilkes (Assistant Headteacher) Content Editors: John Wilson (Headteacher), Mike Oldcorn (ICT Co-ordinator) and Nayra Frugony.

Content
Information taken from their 'ancient' site with the prospectus recently added.

News Items
Are short and sweet at the moment. General information about events at their school. Their use of the easy uploading of thumbnails is particularly commendable.

Effect
A competition has been launched to design the school motto and get the children interacting with the website.

Already, students have signed up, posted comments and sent emails to each other. Traffic shot up between 2-3 pm and again in the evening when parents and teachers were viewing.

Kids (10 year olds) are constantly commenting on teachers' front page posts. And some children are posting stories to the discussion group from home.

Croft Community School, Walsall

Design
Using the school colours of burgundy and gold for the background, we’ve added their new logo.

Editors
Matt Prosser (ICT Co-ordinator) is the sole editor of this site, writing and adding content from school and from home.

Content
Matt has added supplementary pages, making a full and complete list of staff with ‘mug shots.’

News Items
We’re very proud of Matt’s updating of the front page with news. He’s been telling us of school trips, lessons the kids have learnt, it’s been fascinating and so well illustrated with thumbnails.

Effect
Matt’s added new news channels, everytime he posts, several indexing services are told, instantly of his updates.

One class has posted a bunch of news items to the front page.

The Eid and Diwali stories are fine pieces of photo-journalism.

King’s Hill Primary School, Walsall

Design
Using the school colours of red and gold for the background we’ve added their logo.

Editors
Managing Editors: Richard Jones (Headteacher) and Sue Paggett (The School Secretary). Content Editors: Justine Read, Shirley Degville, Simrat Mavi.

Content
From their current prospectus we added over 30 pages.

News Items
The first few items were added during a training session with the three content editors. As soon as they saw how easy it truly was and how slow the trainer’s typing was, the trainer was elbowed out of the way, and soon two computers were updating the site at the same time. Within a few minutes, words and pictures were added to the front page and soon they were picking over the finer details of their news items.

Effect
Shirley and Justine have begun posting illustrated news items from their home computers. We particularly like the Diwali posts and the time when an Australian Aboriginal artist visited the school.

St. Joseph’s Catholic Primary School, Walsall

Design
Using the school colours and badge with the Primary Schools theme.

Editors
Sue Harris the ICT Co-ordinator and Kevin Mee the Headteacher are Managing Editors, while 14 other staff have been give Content Editor status.

Content
St. Joseph's old site was simply copied and pasted into the new site, and once there Sue and Kevin were able to update the content with delightful ease.

News Items
Kevin is publishing news items as they happen that would previously have been held for the weekly news letter. Then once a week he chooses the news that he wants to print out and easily creates his printed version. Each news item has the web address of that item, comments and a bunch of other meta info at its foot. This is so schools can engage those that don't have computers are home.

Pelsall Village School, Walsall

Design
Using the school colours and oak tree logo.

Editors
Tammy Foster (ICT Co-ordinator) is the sole Managing Editor.

Content
Tammy has added several new pages, including: a staff list and an admissions policy.

News Items
Tammy publishes sports news, stats, local news as well as editorial about national news.

Effect
The local swimming instructor has joined up and posted, via the editors, a notice about life saving.

More photo journalism with the school play and a really neat graphic picture of a radiator ;-)

Salisbury Primary School, Walsall

Design
We've added the school logo and made the background resemble the school colours.

Content
We're awaiting a Word Doc with the school's prospectus so we can add default like pages.

News Items
This school has just started in the past few weeks. There's the Head and ITC-Coordinator posting. Lovely story about the decorating party.

Effect
The Head's very keen on us finishing off the 'post to the front page via email from your mobile phone' module. He wants to post pictures directly from his mobile phone. So do I BTW ;-))

So I added this feature, now it's a doddle to update the front page, even from mobile phones. Merely send an email to a secret address, with some pictures as attachments and within 5 minutes your front page is updated. Come back to the site, and edit it, if you want, or enlarge the thumbnailed pictures, or just rearrange till your happy.

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