Name of technology used:  School Website

Name of Intern: Charles Galloway

Describe the success story:  

My greatest accomplishment as an Intern was my work with my school’s website.  Upon entering my school, I was told that the teachers wanted to do more with the school’s website. First, I met with the IT staff at the Central Office so that I could better understand how the site was being used. I learned that each teacher had their own page to which they could include classroom information for the community, but they were having some problems. Many of the teachers were not aware of their homepage. Also, the IT staff was getting a lot of technical support issues from the hundreds of teachers that were using the homepages.

I decided to try and meet with as many teachers as possible to try and understand what role their homepages played in the classroom. First I met with teachers who were not utilizing their homepages to find out why. As it turned out, many of the teachers were not aware that they had a homepage, and others simply could not find the time.  Next, I met with the remaining teachers to find out how they felt about the homepages.  I got a variety of answers, but most of the teachers felt the homepages really were not getting much attention. Finally, after meeting with the Central Office again, it was decided to get rid of the teacher homepages altogether. Instead it was decided that rather than having over a thousand teachers being responsible for editing and updating their homepages, it would be better for each school to have a page on the website for special teacher events and pictures.

What (skills, knowledge or attitude) did you as an Intern learn from this experience?

This project gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of teachers and get involved with the way their classrooms function. I also met with the IT staff and the Central Office and got a good idea of how the school district represents itself to the community through the website.