Why students are the best people to keep your website up to date.

Go back just a couple of years. Our aim was to make a school website system that was incredibly easy to use. We didn’t want that to mean that we compromised on features but our vision was to create a system that teachers and students of any age or ability would find easy and even enjoyable to use.

We do our very best to remember that with everything we build.

As the new curriculum comes in to play very soon, we are working on some content that will help you use your Schudio School Website to teach coding to your students. But that is getting slightly ahead of ourselves!

For now, lets have a think about what we can use your school website for in class. We work with a number of schools and more and more the students, of all ages, are getting involved in adding content to their websites. We had a chat with Helen Mackie at Roose Primary School all the way up in Barrow. Helen runs a Blog Squad in lunch times and filled us in on how they use the Schudio School Website System to make sure that their site reflects the thriving community they all love.

Schudio: “Helen, thanks for talking to us – tell us a bit about how you came to look after the school website”

Helen: “As ICT (sorry computing) coordinator it seems it falls to me to administer and update the website. All the teachers have been shown how to blog and add photo galleries and they do that for their own class. I felt that we needed blogs of after school clubs (the attitude of teachers was pretty much as long as it doesn’t mean extra work for me!) and maybe even just stuff the kids felt like blogging! That’s how Blog Squad came about.”

Schudio: “How easy was it to show get the children involved and show them how to use the system?”

Helen: “It took me about 10 minutes to show the kids how to blog and now they nag me everyday – what can we blog about? It’s great that I get to approve blogs and check spelling etc because they’re set up as editors. I’ve now shown them how to do photo galleries and how to add events as well. This week I’ll show them how to embed photo galleries into blogs – thank you for showing me that last week!”

Schudio: “You’re very welcome! What do you think are the main benefits of having the children involved?”

Helen: “The Schudio system is so straightforward to use and the kids love it – they feel like they’ve got some ownership over our website. I run Blog Squad as a lunch time club and now they know how to do it I just give them a list of things to blog or events to add (or they tell me something they want to blog) and they get on with it. It means the website is always current and it doesn’t take up so much of my time.”

Schudio: “Helen, thanks so much for your time. Keep up the good work!”

Keeping your site up to date is hugely important work but doesn’t have to be a complete bind. Have a read of this article on Keeping your school website up to date on Innovate My School that Ian wrote. It really is very simple and is a little like mowing the lawn. Small, regular efforts will keep things up to date but as we’ve seen today, the students are probably the very best people to do it.