For this week assignment, we were told to choose a school district and analyze the effectiveness of their website. I choose to analyze the town of Bergenfield and after visiting their school district website, I was very impressed with all the resources they had to offer. As a visitor to the page, you have many links to choose from to get to know more about the district. They have a drop down menu at the top right of the website where you are able to select a school from the town that you would like to know more about. They have two separate links for students and parents to access additional resources provided by the school. After clicking on the link for parents, I was amazed to see that there were three different links where parents can check the progress of their children in school: Infinite campus (where they can check for attendance and grades), homeworknow (where they can check what their children's homeworks are), and Renaissance place (where they can go with their children to practice subjects such as reading and math). Since I wanted to know more about these websites, I clicked on homeworknow where I was able to search as a guest and find a list of schools that were participating with this website. After choosing Bergenfield High school, I was given a list of teacher webpages from the school, each page containing their subject, grade level, class assignments, and homework assignments for the week.
After analyzing the full website along with the additional resources provided to parents and students, I realized that the Bergenfield school district provides a very successful and beneficial website to their community. It is obvious that they are aware of the importance of their page and use it to their advantage. I was even amazed to see that they had a link for Bergenfield in the news where you can see many articles in which they are mentioned, including the article that mentions how they placed in the top ten U.S. school districts honored for technology know-how. That's pretty remarkable, if you ask me.
I agree that this was one of the stronger webpages. The more information a page provides, with the less navigation required, the better. I also found that those pages with links to faculty pages gave more information about what was going on in the classroom. I feel as though schools with well developed webpages are more inviting and open with their parents/guardians and their community. They seem very welcoming, and by having a strong page they are encouraging parents to be involved and active within the school.
ReplyDeleteI am so enthusiastic about this whole idea of parents actively getting involved in their child's education through the internet. Especially for parents who work long hours, the internet really is a great (and convenient) tool for parents to use in order keep up-to-date on what is going on inside of the classroom. Yay for classroom blogs! What I found really interesting, however, is that Bergenfield School District's website has an identical template as the school I researched, Magnolia Public School. And this isn't the first time I have observed school websites having identical templates. Fascinating. Suddenly Magnolia Public School's website no longer seems special!
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