The Kennedy Technology Committee met for the last time in the 2003-2004 school year in the evening of June 3rd. Five parents attended, and 3 other members had sent email comments, after previewing the latest mock-up of the new design for the KJHS web site.
New KJHS Web Site. The new design for the KJHS web site was previewed and enthusiastically approved. The header and footer of the main page are carried through to the secondary pages to provide a consistent appearance, and the changes suggested in the May meeting had been incorporated: picture of school kids (provided by Wally Loague), change in menu groupings to Core Teams and to Electives & PE, resized Award and Character Counts logos, and addition of a Literacy Counts link for the district summer reading program as a news item for the summer. Debbie Deacy planned on linking the additional pages over the weekend, and followed through by uploading the new web site Tuesday, June 8th, with some additional corrections uploaded by Ernie Chamot June 10th. The new site is now online!
For next year, we agreed to check with the administrators and try to meet about one week before school starts in the fall, to find what needs to be updated on the web site for the new school year. Sheelagh Cooke provided a new calendar page for the summer, and Paulette Goodman has agreed to provide upload access through the summer to make corrections as necessary. Wally will develop a Handbook page and a Rules page over the summer for the Parents Information section, and Mr. McManis will be developing additional content for the Bands & Orchestra pages. Wally provided a phone number and email list for the teachers and staff. The plan is to convert this into a database that can be accessed via a form on the web site, rather than putting the email addresses directly on a web page, to avoid exposing them to being harvested by spammer robots.
Webquest. Ernie Chamot reported on the activities of the after school group of student junior webmasters, Webquest. The last of the team web pages was updated in May, and the Dream team produced another update with new material from the entire class published online. We had a celebratory meeting May 6th, with certificates for all the students:
and special plaques made up for the co-webmasters David J. (championed writing HTML), Loren R. (championed Java Script), and David C. (championed Cascading Style Sheets), and also for the Champs who showed exceptional tenacity in dealing with unexpected behavior by Frontpage. The last several sessions the kids were branching out into learning to make and incorporate Shockwave content, use Photoshop to fix up graphics, teach themselves how to make use of Cascading Style Sheets, and so on. Brent Davis, in the Tech Lab, offered to be available before school and 7th hour to let Webquest kids use the Tech Lab's Macromedia Director to make Flash movies for web site use.
The Tech Committee's Webteam subcommittee had solved the problem of getting electronic copies of the team newsletters for the webpages, by distributing a free PDF writer to the newsletter editors. But some problems have been found with this approach. Some teams added a page that wasn't included in a single electronic document, so the teachers had the final copy rather than the editors, and some of the newsletters have included students' names, so the newsletters will have to be edited for safety, before they could be put online. We discussed going back to converting the original Word, etc. documents to PDF ourselves, but then Reza Bemanian volunteered to look into getting a simple PDF editor to modify the PDF files we receive. Either that, or the school's copy of Adobe Acrobat could be used to edit PDF files that needed censoring, but otherwise we would continue to use PDF files created by the newsletter editors themselves, to preserve the formatting.
We discussed how Webquest may be different next year. With the team pages now in good shape, Webquest may be more useful to maintain the other web pages. The last two years we have started with several short "teach" sessions to get everyone started, and to make sure no one feels left out or overwhelmed. Now that the 7th and 8th graders will have heard these a couple times, we talked about just having a separate session for the 6th graders, and maybe brainstorming with the students on what they would like to do.
Next Year's Tech Committee Plans. We agreed to try to schedule an organizational meeting, starting with the current members, a week before school starts. We also discussed sponsoring a Parent Technology Night, either separately, or as part of Kennedy's open house to get parent's interested in participating in the Technology Committee. Suggestions for Tech Night activities included: a LAN party with an online game, a station to take a picture and swap it into the Kennedy web page and print it out, have an LRC person show the online resources available, have a discussion on internet safety and how to get rid of spyware. For separate Tech Nights, we could have invited lecturers on technical topics.
Return to Tech Committee page, reload KJHS home page, or NCUSD 203 web site.