Why a Scoil.net website for your school?

The core of the answer is learning outcomes in your school. Has your school the vision to choose a system that will add an exciting and engaging dimension to all the learning that takes place in your school?

School leadership and vision:

"Learning is a matter of intensity not elapsed time" - Tom Peters

Publishing Learning Projects on your website is NOT the primary goal. Igniting the fire of learning and the excitement for teaching is the real goal. Give your teachers and pupils a safe, easy to use publishing facility for their art, their photos, their creative writing, their science experiments, their music compositions - and they will come up with hundreds of learning projects that you and I have never even dreamed of!

"Don't go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Questions to ask yourself:

Have you researched, (talked with colleagues and other schools) to find out what is the simplest website to setup and maintain?
Have you visited other school websites to get an idea of the features that will work for you?
Do you know which website system is the easiest and safest to use in terms of publishing pupils' work?
Do you know which is the cheapest solution by far because it is based on Open Source software?
Which system answers the real-world needs of schools based on actual experience - not on marketing hype?

Talk to other schools, get their feedback on what type of solution(s) and features they rate highly - and then come back to Scoil.net and you will find that all of your criteria are already rolled into one ready-to-use, simple yet sophisticated website system that will serve your school superbly in the coming years.

Mistakes to avoid:

DON'T!!!

Don't pay for a 'pig in a poke'. Know exactly what your website will look like and will be able to do - BEFORE you commit!
Don't get an ICT-confident teacher to develop/maintain your website. They will become an overworked publishing bottleneck and would far rather put their energies into hand-holding teachers to *use* a superb website, than try to develop an average one.
Don't get a web development company. Even if they work at quarter-price, they might not understand what schools really need.

Summary:

What type of learning opportunities do you want to enable in your school? With a Scoil.net website every teacher and class can easily publish their projects, every parent can receive texts and emails which take you seconds to organise and finally your school can save significant time, resources and headaches by publishing news, alerts, newsletters, school information, administrative forms etc. - all re-usable, at your fingertips.

Last Updated on Monday, 30 March 2009 15:09