Book about school sites. About the purpose of the school site
I continue to publish the book "Creating a school website: from concept to implementation and development." Today talk about the goals of the school site. Better than any theoretical calculations, real school stories work.
Based on the comments to the first post , I want to once again draw attention to such a moment. The audience for this handbook is school managers, people who are not sophisticated about the web. Something may look rather simplistic, some things are obvious. This is not in terms of an apology, but to prevent comments about “who needs it,” “it's obvious,” “what to write about it,” and so on. Believe me, for many it is not at all obvious.
Any activity must begin with setting goals. There are goals for the school site. But we will not attempt to formally state these goals from the very beginning. Just a few stories from real educational practice.
Imagine that the school manager comes to you at the beginning of the school year with the goal of sending your child to school. It does not matter here whether the child enters the 1st, 10th or any other class. Naturally, the parent is very much interested in: who, what and how teaches, what is the mode of work, what are the opportunities for additional education, how is food organized, what are the exam results, what do graduates do, how is safety ensured, and a thousand more important and not-so things . If the parent today is not your first one, you repeat to him, on the nth occasion, everything that you have already spoken several times in different variations. This is tedious, time consuming and not always constructive: after all, information is often perceived as distorted from the ear. The conversation will go much more constructively if the parent first acquaints himself with the materials of the school website and makes up a general impression for himself that will only need to be concretized in person.
')
Another variation on the same topic. In your office - the parent who came to arrange the child to school. Naturally, you are interested in why he chose your school, what exactly led him to you. And imagine, you hear: "I learned about school from your site . " Tell me, what information about the person standing in front of you do you already own?
First of all, most likely (not exactly!) A person of a certain socio-cultural level is in front of you. He owns computer skills and “logs in” to the Internet. Perhaps he has a computer at home. Or at work, therefore, is a person associated with office activities.
Secondly, he attended to looking for an educational institution for his child, and did not come to the school that is geographically closest, therefore, this parent takes very seriously the issues of education and upbringing of the child, and you can rely on it, because education for this families are valuable and the child is really engaged here, his parents care about his life. Do you want to have such parents, and not those who bring a child to school, as if they are handing over to the locker room - so that they don’t hang around the streets?
Thirdly, having estimated the information from your site, this parent made his choice and came exactly to you. Therefore, we can assume that, on the one hand, this is a person who has clearly seen more than one school website and chose quite consciously, on the other, which is very important, he assumes that it is your school that will be adequate for his child. This is potentially “your” parent.
In education, quite often you can hear the expression "the struggle of the school for the student." Although our reality with you for financial and legal reasons often refutes this opinion, but the struggle for any student of any school is a myth. It will probably be more correct to say that the school is fighting (or wants to fight) for YOUR student. And in this case, when you see a prepared parent in front of you, the likelihood that he will lead you to "your" student will greatly increase. It would be superfluous to say that further in-person dialogue with such a parent would be much more constructive and concrete.
As far as this situation is real, how many parents already today receive a primary impression about the school through its official website? Probably not yet, but the dynamics are interesting. In 2004, a St. Petersburg school had its own website. The year there were no parental responses. In 2005, with the words: “I learned about your school from the site and I want my child to study here,” came three parents, in 2006, 11 people. As it turned out, there was not a single “problem” child among them, these were socially successful families, seriously interested in quality education, ready for a constructive dialogue with the school. How many such parents will be in the future - time will tell. It can be said that so far there are few such situations, but in the future, the school website may well become one of the priority forms for parents to receive information about OA.
On the website of one Petersburg school a forum was created for communication between the administration, students, graduates, teachers, and parents. Among others, the “Psychological Counseling” section was introduced, in which school students were given the opportunity to anonymously address personal issues. This section was led by a recent graduate of the psychology department of St. Petersburg State University who worked as a psychologist at school and was interested in mastering the Internet as a professional environment. For a long time, the content of this section was composed of questions like “How do you like a boy from a parallel class?” Or “How can I explain to my mother that I’m already an adult and can come home not at 9 pm and later?” But once in the psychological section of the forum, the topic “ I don't want to live anymore! ” Without any signature (recall, anonymous section), someone described the situation that led him to thoughts of suicide: troubles and conflicts at school, low self-esteem, troubles in relationships with parents, lack of further perspectives and meanings of life. The child wrote: "In fact, I have already decided everything, but maybe something else will be said here." The long cycle of correspondence, questions and answers very slowly and gradually began to correct the situation (do I have to say how disturbed the administration was watching the work of the young psychologist: there was no other information about the writer who wrote about the forum). The problem was solved. Only by chance in six months it turned out that it was in fact. It turned out that the threat was quite serious, that it was this forum correspondence that was encouraging and keeping the student from the last step. Needless to say, one such example redeems any costs of creating a school website.
Again, a section for graduates was created on the forum of one of the school websites. Despite the fact that Odnoklassniki.Ru , Moy Krug , Vkontakte and other popular social networking services are very popular and popular today, graduates of this school preferred to keep in touch with each other on the school site forum. “Dividends” for the school did not take long to wait: out of the number of graduates, two young specialists came to work in vacancies, through graduates they managed to find funds for the repair of two rooms, the school practice included meetings with graduates who became one of the forms of vocational guidance and adaptation activities.
At school there was a rather weak method of unification of mathematics teachers. As a result, the level of teaching was directly proportional to the students' achievement and enthusiasm for this discipline. But at the same time there was a convenient site created at the initiative of the teacher of computer science with the support of the administration. An interactive section called “Entertaining Mathematics” was introduced, which was agreed to by a strong mathematician from a neighboring school. After a while it became the most visited section of the site, while the students of this and other schools came here and brought their friends. The interest of students in the subject gradually increased, knowledge of mathematics in school slowly, but went up.
This is not even a story, rather, just thinking. School site can be used for distance learning. This is a serious issue that requires in-depth study, but its relevance today is indisputable, especially in a situation where, on the one hand, school profiling poses quite serious tasks for educational institutions that not every school alone can solve, on the other - you need to look for new forms work with children who, for one reason or another, are not ready to attend classes regularly. And we have a lot of such students today. These are sick children who are home schooled and children who are seriously involved in sports or who receive additional education outside the school (they often have to skip lessons). Today there is also the problem of attending school for 11th graders, especially in the second half of the year, when the final exams at the preparatory courses and university olympiads begin, participation in which provides benefits on admission. The distance learning system will remove many conflicts and help the school to properly build relationships with such students.
These are just some examples, a list of which, on reflection, an experienced administrator will be able to continue based on their experience. It is important for us to emphasize that the opportunities that the school website today provides are quite a lot in both educational and managerial areas. Some are understandable, others are unexpected, and still others can arise only from real practical experience. From this we allow ourselves to conclude that the school website is a new educational reality, the features of work and the effects of which by the pedagogical community are not yet sufficiently reflected. And here one way is empirical.
In the most general form, let us try to answer the question about the goal of the school creating its website.
Based on the comments to the first post , I want to once again draw attention to such a moment. The audience for this handbook is school managers, people who are not sophisticated about the web. Something may look rather simplistic, some things are obvious. This is not in terms of an apology, but to prevent comments about “who needs it,” “it's obvious,” “what to write about it,” and so on. Believe me, for many it is not at all obvious.
Any activity must begin with setting goals. There are goals for the school site. But we will not attempt to formally state these goals from the very beginning. Just a few stories from real educational practice.
First story
Imagine that the school manager comes to you at the beginning of the school year with the goal of sending your child to school. It does not matter here whether the child enters the 1st, 10th or any other class. Naturally, the parent is very much interested in: who, what and how teaches, what is the mode of work, what are the opportunities for additional education, how is food organized, what are the exam results, what do graduates do, how is safety ensured, and a thousand more important and not-so things . If the parent today is not your first one, you repeat to him, on the nth occasion, everything that you have already spoken several times in different variations. This is tedious, time consuming and not always constructive: after all, information is often perceived as distorted from the ear. The conversation will go much more constructively if the parent first acquaints himself with the materials of the school website and makes up a general impression for himself that will only need to be concretized in person.
')
Another variation on the same topic. In your office - the parent who came to arrange the child to school. Naturally, you are interested in why he chose your school, what exactly led him to you. And imagine, you hear: "I learned about school from your site . " Tell me, what information about the person standing in front of you do you already own?
First of all, most likely (not exactly!) A person of a certain socio-cultural level is in front of you. He owns computer skills and “logs in” to the Internet. Perhaps he has a computer at home. Or at work, therefore, is a person associated with office activities.
Secondly, he attended to looking for an educational institution for his child, and did not come to the school that is geographically closest, therefore, this parent takes very seriously the issues of education and upbringing of the child, and you can rely on it, because education for this families are valuable and the child is really engaged here, his parents care about his life. Do you want to have such parents, and not those who bring a child to school, as if they are handing over to the locker room - so that they don’t hang around the streets?
Thirdly, having estimated the information from your site, this parent made his choice and came exactly to you. Therefore, we can assume that, on the one hand, this is a person who has clearly seen more than one school website and chose quite consciously, on the other, which is very important, he assumes that it is your school that will be adequate for his child. This is potentially “your” parent.
In education, quite often you can hear the expression "the struggle of the school for the student." Although our reality with you for financial and legal reasons often refutes this opinion, but the struggle for any student of any school is a myth. It will probably be more correct to say that the school is fighting (or wants to fight) for YOUR student. And in this case, when you see a prepared parent in front of you, the likelihood that he will lead you to "your" student will greatly increase. It would be superfluous to say that further in-person dialogue with such a parent would be much more constructive and concrete.
As far as this situation is real, how many parents already today receive a primary impression about the school through its official website? Probably not yet, but the dynamics are interesting. In 2004, a St. Petersburg school had its own website. The year there were no parental responses. In 2005, with the words: “I learned about your school from the site and I want my child to study here,” came three parents, in 2006, 11 people. As it turned out, there was not a single “problem” child among them, these were socially successful families, seriously interested in quality education, ready for a constructive dialogue with the school. How many such parents will be in the future - time will tell. It can be said that so far there are few such situations, but in the future, the school website may well become one of the priority forms for parents to receive information about OA.
Second story
On the website of one Petersburg school a forum was created for communication between the administration, students, graduates, teachers, and parents. Among others, the “Psychological Counseling” section was introduced, in which school students were given the opportunity to anonymously address personal issues. This section was led by a recent graduate of the psychology department of St. Petersburg State University who worked as a psychologist at school and was interested in mastering the Internet as a professional environment. For a long time, the content of this section was composed of questions like “How do you like a boy from a parallel class?” Or “How can I explain to my mother that I’m already an adult and can come home not at 9 pm and later?” But once in the psychological section of the forum, the topic “ I don't want to live anymore! ” Without any signature (recall, anonymous section), someone described the situation that led him to thoughts of suicide: troubles and conflicts at school, low self-esteem, troubles in relationships with parents, lack of further perspectives and meanings of life. The child wrote: "In fact, I have already decided everything, but maybe something else will be said here." The long cycle of correspondence, questions and answers very slowly and gradually began to correct the situation (do I have to say how disturbed the administration was watching the work of the young psychologist: there was no other information about the writer who wrote about the forum). The problem was solved. Only by chance in six months it turned out that it was in fact. It turned out that the threat was quite serious, that it was this forum correspondence that was encouraging and keeping the student from the last step. Needless to say, one such example redeems any costs of creating a school website.
Third story
Again, a section for graduates was created on the forum of one of the school websites. Despite the fact that Odnoklassniki.Ru , Moy Krug , Vkontakte and other popular social networking services are very popular and popular today, graduates of this school preferred to keep in touch with each other on the school site forum. “Dividends” for the school did not take long to wait: out of the number of graduates, two young specialists came to work in vacancies, through graduates they managed to find funds for the repair of two rooms, the school practice included meetings with graduates who became one of the forms of vocational guidance and adaptation activities.
Fourth story
At school there was a rather weak method of unification of mathematics teachers. As a result, the level of teaching was directly proportional to the students' achievement and enthusiasm for this discipline. But at the same time there was a convenient site created at the initiative of the teacher of computer science with the support of the administration. An interactive section called “Entertaining Mathematics” was introduced, which was agreed to by a strong mathematician from a neighboring school. After a while it became the most visited section of the site, while the students of this and other schools came here and brought their friends. The interest of students in the subject gradually increased, knowledge of mathematics in school slowly, but went up.
Fifth story
This is not even a story, rather, just thinking. School site can be used for distance learning. This is a serious issue that requires in-depth study, but its relevance today is indisputable, especially in a situation where, on the one hand, school profiling poses quite serious tasks for educational institutions that not every school alone can solve, on the other - you need to look for new forms work with children who, for one reason or another, are not ready to attend classes regularly. And we have a lot of such students today. These are sick children who are home schooled and children who are seriously involved in sports or who receive additional education outside the school (they often have to skip lessons). Today there is also the problem of attending school for 11th graders, especially in the second half of the year, when the final exams at the preparatory courses and university olympiads begin, participation in which provides benefits on admission. The distance learning system will remove many conflicts and help the school to properly build relationships with such students.
These are just some examples, a list of which, on reflection, an experienced administrator will be able to continue based on their experience. It is important for us to emphasize that the opportunities that the school website today provides are quite a lot in both educational and managerial areas. Some are understandable, others are unexpected, and still others can arise only from real practical experience. From this we allow ourselves to conclude that the school website is a new educational reality, the features of work and the effects of which by the pedagogical community are not yet sufficiently reflected. And here one way is empirical.
In the most general form, let us try to answer the question about the goal of the school creating its website.
This goal is connected with the creation of a new way of information interaction outside the system and inside it. Due to this, the school becomes more open, more understandable, learns to build partnerships with society, finds adequate ways to solve the problems it faces.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/60700/
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