Chapter Two: School District Web Page

This week, I examined the website for the Madison school district.  Aesthetically, it is nice that the web page is all red for the town's school color, and I like that there are photos of the different schools and the town clock at the top of the page.  However, the navigation tabs on the top pf the the home page are quite small and crowded together, making it a somewhat overwhelming task to browse around.  Despite these small difficulties, however, the site does contain important information for parents and students.

There is a tab dedicated to Parent Resources which lists various parent associations such as fund-raising and volunteering clubs and information about before and after-school care programs.  The Calendar tab is also particularly useful to parents as well as students.  It lists school events, school holidays, and PTO meetings.  In addition to these detailed pages, the Home Page also highlights important news and events and announcements.  Under the Curriculum and Instruction tab, there is another section for Parent Resources which includes useful links such as Book Recommendations organized by grade level, Homework Survival Tips, and a Family Newsletter.

How does the Madison school district website stack up in comparison to the kind of ideal school website Dr. McKenzie talks about in his article?  McKenzie states that a quality school/district website should inform visitors of the following things: "its mission, its character, its look, its offerings to children, its stance on new technologies and its overall spirit" (McKenzie, 1997).  The Madison school district website presents these important traits in the following ways:

• Mission/character: The site  does a good job of sharing its mission and character in this link.
• Look: Madison's schools are represented in photos at the top of the home page.  These photos, however, fail to give the website visitor the best picture of the schools because they don't include any indoor photos and they are all shot from very far away.  Thus, the visitor only gets a vague idea of the look of the schools.
• Offerings to children: The site makes it clear that Madison schools go out of their way to provide for the needs of all students, as evidenced in their Special Services tab.
• Stance on new technologies: The site has a Technology tab dedicated specifically to the effort of the district to "tap into the transformative educational power of technology."
• Overall spirit: The site paints the district to have an overall spirit of professionalism, dedication and achievement.  This is evidenced by the copious amount of information and references found on the website.  Clearly, a great deal of work was put into the website, suggesting that the administration and staff of the Madison schools put the same kind of work into their daily jobs as educators.

In addition, McKenzie states that quality school/district websites need to include "the best resources the Web has to offer an educational family" (McKenzie, 1997).  The Madison school district website certainly accomplishes that goal with the following links:

• Board of Education FAQ's
• Testing Reports
• School Website E-Alerts
• Madison Education Foundation
• Title I Notification
• Parent Resources
• On-Line Faculty Resources

McKenzie states that websites should "offer an opportunity for the publishing of student works to both a local and a global audience" (McKenzie, 1997).  The Madison school district website does so.  Click here to see an example of this.

Finally, according to McKenzie, a quality school/district website must include collections of "rich data locally collected on curriculum related topics" such as "data warehouses, virtual museums or virtual libraries" (McKenzie, 1997).  A good example of this, I think, would be the Testing Reports.  This appears, however, to be one of the only examples of this kind of data collection, so McKenzie would probably consider the site to fall short in this regard.

Chapter One: Purposeful Integration of Technology in Schools

My experience with technology in the classroom has been minimal. In fifth grade, I remember doing a project on the planets that involved some internet use.  In middle school, I recall frustrating library sessions designed to teach us students to use EbscoHost for a research project.  In high school, the old fashioned library was transformed into a “Media Center,” but the only thing the computers seemed to be used for was Myspace and using the school’s new email network to send jokes to friends.  Thus, in my academic experience, technology was used, but the reason for doing so instead of using traditional methods was never clear.  Students didn’t know why they were occasionally made to use technology, and I suspect that the teachers didn’t know either.

To me, the important thing about utilizing technology in the classroom is having a clear purpose for doing so.  The state-of-the-art Media Center at my high school may have been created with good intentions, but without tech-savvy teachers and a different kind of curriculum to accompany it, it turned out to be an enormous waste of money.  All too often, it seems that technology is integrated into the classroom as more of an attempt to make a point that the school is keeping up with the times than as an actual improvement in education.

Of course, some schools have managed to use technology in meaningful ways, as described in “Four Takes on Technology.”  The first entry, about technology’s ability to improve students’ interaction with primary source documents, was nice but did not seem to be the best use for technology.  The other three entries, about using the internet and digital software to learn about one’s culture and others’ cultures, however, did strike me as great applications of technology in education.  Not only do projects such as Friends and Flags, the project on the Amistad, and GenYES teach students valuable technical skills, but they also serve important social purposes.  Friends and Flags has the potential to improve tense relations between Jews and Arabs, if only among children.  The project on Amistad has the potential to teach students things about the African American identity that they may not encounter in other classrooms.  Finally, GenYES utilizes the technological know-how of students to teach teachers of older generations the information technology skills that they need in today’s education field.

In conclusion, I hope to use this class to get some ideas about how to use technology in a real, meaningful way as discussed in the video and article assigned for this week.


*UPDATE: It seems my high school, Chatham High School, did change the way it used technology since I graduated from there in 2006.  And for the better, it seems... Frontline story about technology in CHS