Michael C. Warren

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This month’s biggest problem occurred when we came back from Christmas holiday to find out that our hosting provider moved servers on us. None of our Adobe Contribute keys functioned so they had to be reissued for ever user in the district.  There were certain items missing from the web site that had been placed within the past two month.  Because of this I had to find out the new connection information, working with the provider to set up ftp.maypearlisd.org instead of an IP address so that if further server changes ever occurred, it would not disrupt our process, and keys would not have to be made again.  I am still having issues with administration not wanting to post their own work and the current scenario is that I am still updating certain non-teacher related information on the Secondary campus site.  If we could focus attention for some of the staff to learn the new system it would be much more efficient for me during the time I teach.  I did spend some time helping the IT department troubleshoot a failed hard drive. During this time I researched the error code and contacted the manufacturer to see if there was an alternative to replacing the drive. In essence checking for a system check.

This month was pretty light as a week was spent at the TCEA conference in Austin.  There was a small amount of time in which I helped a user solve some problems with their laptop, and also helped solve some web editing problems that users were having at the Intermediate Campus.  Still can’t encourage the administration office to make their own changes to the website, so I still receive updates from them.

Over the course of this first month after receiving information regarding what is required for the Internship I have begun to realize some things are already being set into motion. I also know there are many other things that I could place into my logs if I go back and look at what I have been doing since the beginning of this program. One of these items that have been in motion for a while is our continuing development of our web site. Since I redesigned the web site two years ago, it has continued to expand and we are offering new opportunities for teachers to create their own pages using Adobe Contribute. I have been focusing on training staff at the elementary and intermediate schools, while cohort Karen James has been offering training at the high school level. This month I provided some basic training as well as support for some issues were having with their software. In addition to helping teachers with Adobe Contribute I have put together some ideas to offer staff development training to teachers who would like to learn about Google Docs, Google Sites, and Survey Monkey and how they can be used in their classrooms.

Besides work that has already been in development I have started to work on offering students an opportunity to take the Microsoft Certified Application Specialist for Microsoft Word. This is something we are hoping to grow over the next few years by offering more and more certification options for students. This year we only have 5, but I am hoping in the future we can offer the test as part of the curriculum.

While last month I started developing my action plan, this month many things started getting put into action. I researched some topics that I thought might be of interest for teachers, such as using Google docs, Google sites, and Survey Monkey. Survey Monkey got the most interest from teachers and they have already started to find ways to use it for their classes. Our Microsoft Certification program was having some problems I worked to get things up from the last part of last month. As a contact person between our IT department and Certiport I eventually worked to help get a solution so that students could run the software over the network. The problem was our firewall, as well as restrictions on the student’s accounts. We created a new account just for the Lab use that goes around the firewall issue, and gives students more access for the application on the workstations.

Our current web hosting service that also provides our broadband connectivity has told us that they will not be offering web and mail hosting for us next year, so we are in the process of starting to look for a new hosting provider. As part of our search we have a meeting planned in May with eChalk, but I have started to research what services eChalk provides. From what I see so far they have been around for a while, and offer a number of good services. In early may we will have a teleconference and I hope it answers some of the questions I have regarding technical offerings and specific web manipulation. If we go with one of these new services I am hoping we can also use it as an online learning management solution as well. I have talked to our counselor and she is interested in offering additional staff development for things like TAKS in an online environment to help teachers make sure they do the allotted training required.

May was a slow month, yet a busy month. It was slow in the sense that I did not get as much as I wanted to do with my filed projects only because I was finishing up with finals at Navarro College and finishing projects with students at Maypearl ISD. The work that was done this month was researching and attending meetings in regards to a new web hosting service. It appears that after years of hosting our website through our Internet Service Provider, the provider has decided to just focus on internet access. This has put us into a quick research and review of some alternative hosting services. We researched two options that included eChalk and School Fusion. While both had their merits, they key is that we want web hosting, email, a basic learning management system, and storage for students. For me, School Fusion was a “shinier” product, but it lacked an email solution.

The last I heard the district was looking into the pricing of eChalk and how that pricing may go if we purchase their complete package. As the current web developer, I am excited about moving to a content management system because it will be managed by an outside organization, leaving more free time for our technology department to focus on other issues. In addition it will be database driven allowing for better control of the structure and layout. Additional features will also be added that are beyond my current scope, and will allow me to return my focus to teaching courses.

June was a month in which I focused some attention on personal needs. I did not do much in terms of focusing on projects this month. I will be dedicating July and August back to school based projects that will include developing and creating training sessions for our new Content Management System eChalk so that teachers may began to use it during the new school year as both a way to inform parents and utilize the tools as a training system. In addition I will be working with other departments to use the same technology for staff development resources.

As part of our ongoing effort to get users to be more involved with information to their web pages, and because our web hosting service was changing to an Internet Provider only service we decided to switch our web hosting to eChalk. This was approved by School Board last month, and transition to the new service started this month.  We began talking about images for a head banner, and also a design for district branding, which had not been done before.  Scheduled date for training the trainers is for early August.

This month was very busy, with our new system coming online, a scheduled training for campus technology assistants/teachers who would be helping their campus with eChalk. During this time, we had 3 people from our campus attend. Karen James and I are both part of the Lamar University Technology Leadership Program and have been working on the web stuff off and on together for the past year. After talking with her, I have let her be our gatekeeper in regards to how many things are managed, while I focus on more detailed research regarding some of the tools and deeper technical issues for the school. During in-service we co-trained our fellow teachers and staff to begin using the new eChalk system. Karen worked in a larger group setting in her training while I focused on helping those that needed one-on-one training. Some of the more in depth research I did was to see how the student accounts worked, what they could see and what limitations they had. In addition I setup a way for parents to create their own account in the system so they could monitor their students work, and I created an online form for dress code infractions.

This new system has finally broken down some barriers and we have more people involved with keeping up the schools website than ever before. It is changing on a more regular basis and we are having fewer problems than before.

I still feel that we should be sending out letters to parents by the 3 weeks mark, but I have seen in the past that the school often puts technology into place and it will take from 6 weeks to a semester before information is sent out. That I do not know how to fix, but I know that the kids are excited, and many parents have questions, but we are only getting a small amount of the school and parents involved at this point.