Michael C. Warren

With the Holiday this month was a little slower than the past months. I spent some time making changes to the web site, as well as help Ms. Day, our principle, begin working with contribute.  With the permission of Ms. Day I began testing the concept of using FaceBook and Twitter to get information to students about their classes that I teach. Initially the idea went well with students when I mentioned it to them, but the overall interest amounted to about 4 students following my class, with another 4 students who already graduated observing as well.

Additions were made early on to the district website, including adding video for the first time to our home page.  This month I provided training to the Intermediate campus in order to get them setting up their own web pages.  As part of their training I set up their website folders and sent Adobe Contribute keys.  I set up the pages for the cross country team.

As we began to get the elementary campus off the ground on making changes to their own web pages, I find that those at the administration building do not want to post their own information to the web site, and I still continue to post for them.  A staff member at the high school was having problems and I was able with their computer that I was able to correct during my conference period.  A key element I researched was trying to find a solution to keep students from getting around our proxy server with the Firefox browser. This resulted in modifying code and sending changes to each computers system files. This was easily done by using a batch file running a copy command for each computer.  I met again with the elementary school to help with some problems with Adobe Contribute and then met at the end of the month to do an initial training session with our Intermediate campus to get them up and running with Adobe Contribute.

After an opportunity to test the use of Adobe Contribute on the secondary campus and make additional changes to the website, I met with the Superintendant, Information Technology department and tech leaders from the other campuses. During this meeting we talked about how we would use Adobe Contribute to extend the use of staff and teachers managing specific parts of the website to a district wide level. Each campus technology leader would be in charge of helping users maintain their pages, while any advanced problems would come to me.  The goal would be to have more than one person in control of the web, and troubleshooting could be spread out amongst the group of users.  A meeting time to train the elementary staff was planned and I spent time setting up keys and folders for the staff at the elementary school.

As the new school year began I had the opportunity to talk with the Superintendant and discuss the possible changes I thought we could make over the course of the year. One of the things we discussed was figuring out a way we could eventually have teachers update their own pages and allow certain staff members have the ability to edit certain parts of the site.  This is a direction I saw us going and our current option while maintaining our budget would be to use Adobe Contribute for each user who wants to make edits to the website.  One of the first things I had to do was to see how the Adobe Contribute Key works. This key has to be used with the software program in order to make edits. The key contains information about site access and permissions for that user while keeping that information from the person accessing the site to edit it.  The down side to using this method is having a license for contribute and it had to be used on machines with the software, limiting teachers to edit from other locations. Fortunately we already had for 500 users, and began looking into how the contribute key would work with the current site.  One of the first lessons I learned is that I could not limit users to pages, but had to limit them to folders.  Because of this I had to restructure the entire website so that each campus had a dedicated folder, and each teacher had a dedicated subfolder of their own, that they could edit without editing any other page in the district.  Campus tech leaders would have the right to edit anything in their campus folder, and at the district level they could make any changes to all pages.  After restructuring the website, we began sending out the Adobe Contribute keys to a majority of staff members, mostly at the Secondary level.

Not much was done this month, as everyone was pretty much out on holiday. I received a call from administration and the IT department as they were trying to use Adobe Contribute to make a modification to the school website.  Their staff of two does not have an understanding of web development.  While out of town I helped walk them through the basic use of and Adobe Contribute, from installing their key which allows them to make edits to the web page, to making edits and then publishing the changes to the website.  They were very happy to see how easy it was to make a change.

As our school district does not have a dedicated website person and out technology staff of two does not have understanding of HTML, I have been involved helping to make changes to the website. We started out with a very basic site, and I have converted it to a template based site utilizing Adobe Dreamweaver. This has helped so that I can make changes to the template, which includes the menu structure, so that changes affecting the template can be made across a site that consists of several hundred pages in a very short time.  I hope that in time I can get the site to be a more efficient and useful tool for the school and the community.

Keeping up and maintaining a site can be a full time position for any school district. Our district does not have the resources to have a dedicated tech person to manage the web site. So in this case I am having to be very involved and aware of ISTE standard V and utilizing the Internet to communicate with staff, teachers, students and the community.