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.