Cyber Image

Here at Three Oaks, four of us are enrolled in Ed6620 and took this week’s panel discussion “off-line” and discussed the issues in person. We took on the many roles of different stakeholders and answered this week’s questions from the various perspectives that would be presented at such a round table discussion. Hence this response is not from one individual but a collaborative response from four of your classmates:
David Ramsay (Administration)
Forrest Lilly (Parent Council)
Ryan McAleer (Student)
David McNeill (Teacher)

Opening Thoughts:
When it comes to branding, it would be difficult to be all things to all people, so we need to identify the stakeholders that are most important in the educational community, our target market. Once we have done that, we need to define our goals and align them with the image we portray on our website. Why do we need a website and what will it do for us? One of the issues that we, as teachers, have is that we really are providing different services to different stakeholders. We need a communication site for parents to inform them about issues like attendance, up coming events, behaviour, and progress. This aspect of the website must be easy to manage, update, and maintain in order for teachers to use it as a communication tool. The addition of email, simple and private, allows parents to ask questions and make comments. Our school’s website provides a list of all teaching staff and their emails. It also provides a link to Students Achieve which allows parents to access attendance and grades with daily updates. Communication tools for parents should be kept simple or user-friendly to accommodate
those parents that are less experienced with information technology. The School’s website needs to portray an image of simplicity for user friendliness. We don’t think parents are interested in cutting edge technology when it comes to their kids’ education; they are interested in their kids.

A second target market is obvious, the students themselves. The students need to be able to access content and classroom support when needed. Students want to be able to perform tasks with predictability and success. Teachers without a plan, may attempt to fill their websites with the latest in cyber imaging techniques with the hope of finding uses for it in the future. A process
which could prove discouraging and frustrating for all stakeholders. Adding sophistication to a
website for the sake of having it wastes money, time, and undermines the integrity of the
website when not supported by a plan. If students can’t understand the content and navigate
through it with ease they will become frustrated and abandon the Website as a learning tool.
We feel the pressure to make messages more attractive, more compelling, and more engaging both in our classrooms and with our online tools. This was our mindset before we took on the role-playing aspect of this week’s assignment.

Panel Discussion:
Our panel discussion consisted of the following roles:
· Administration
· Teachers
· Parents
· Students

Effective design involves maintaining a modern level of standards in Web based design. While each stakeholder may have different views on what should be contained on a website there was some agreement on the Web design. All stakeholders believed that simplicity was essential for developing a cyber-image. From the panel discussion students were most concern with entertainment value and modernization of the Web design. They were also the most educated on current trends and sought to incorporate the latest technologies in our school web page. The current popularity of social software was brought to the forefront of the discussion by students. They repeatedly used the expression “facebook for school” where students would develop an online profile and have access to various online chats and discussion boards. In contrast, parents, educators, and administrators are weary of the issues of implementing such software. Issues that were brought up were cyber safety, cyber bullying, privacy, maintenance, educational value, and the redundancy of creating a service already provided to students for free via facebook or my space.

All stakeholders agreed that the school web site should have limited deterioration and that the
information provided should be both relevant and up to date. Complaints with sites having dead links and ‘site under construction’ were aired by all parties. Teachers and administrators were particularly concerned with who would be in charge of site maintenance and updates.

We found that the average public school does not have concerns with selling courses to international students currently in their homeland via the web. The only stakeholder that seemed concerned with the issue of international education was administration. They identified the prospects of distance education courses or providing courses that would involve marketing to universities to justify a need to include these types of users. If such an initiative was to be spearheaded, some of the elements to include are the following:
· Intrinsic support
· Use of appropriate language, including multi-lingual information
· Photos depicting cultural diversity
· Usability/simplistic design

The panel had the following recommendations with regards to the purveying of photographs,
description and work of minors:
· Parental and student permission needed for any use of photos (raised by parents and
administration)
· Student names should not be connected with any photos (raised by parents and administration)
· Only appropriate photos should be used. (raised by all parties)
· Having dedicated sections on the website for various student involvement “student spotlight",
sports, clubs, social activities section. (raised by students)

Regarding the international standards that provide guidelines for purveying educational materials online, only administration and teachers had concerns. The discussion mostly centered around intellectual property and ensuring that the integrity of the school image was maintained when including other parties work on the school website. After an internet search, W3C standards seem to provide a good starting point for the creation of such standards.

Parents were very keen in using portal technology on the school website. Parents are often
overwhelmed with the various usernames and passwords provided to them by the various schools their children attend. If parents have children in multiple schools in the same region they liked the idea of having one username and password to link to the various school websites, essentially using portal technology and integrated databases. Administration was very resistant to this idea as they felt the IT personal at their schools would be overwhelmed by this administrative and maintenance nightmare.

However all stakeholders were interested in the idea of having a “subscription” aspect to the school website, essentially having a two tiered website. One in which outside users can peruse the site with limited viewing capacity and another with a full access subscription which provides users with the ability of portaling to various sites, including attendance systems, email, course work and other educational materials.

Lastly, there were varying views on what latest trends should be emulated and surpassed. Students were very interested in using social media, blogs, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), while the other stakeholders had issues with the use of this trend. All parties did agree with using Web 2.0 and the current trend of using a simplistic approach in both style and navigation is one that would benefit the school website.

After the discussion the panel members had different perspectives on the outcome of the meeting. Teachers were frustrated with the demands placed on them by the parent and student demands for information. Teachers were concerned with the additional workload and time commitments that other stakeholders seemed willing to place upon them. Students felt that their desire for a more social aspect to the site was sidelined by safety and legal concerns.
Parents were satisfied with the balance between the increased efforts to spotlight student work and their concern for safety. In response to the panel’s input, administrators felt that students could be involved in some of the site maintenance and updating through a student based club or an actual course on Web Page Design.