Introduction:
Every school
recognises that a school intranet would be a valuable resource to
have. Many schools already have vast networks and large
numbers of computers but how effectively are they really being
used?
Schools that tried have found the reality is that intranets are not simple
to setup. For a start, creating and maintaining all the web
pages needed is a very time consuming task - and many schools get
bogged down developing pages that concentrate on the
administrative aspects of school such as timetables and getting
policies on-line.
While these are
clearly important aspects, they do nothing to assist students'
learning. It's a simple case of automating for the sake of
automating. Instead of automating, we should be informating
in schools.
To do this, intranet development in schools should be driven and owned by the
students and that's where Stu's EduWeb comes
in. It does the automating so the students can get on with
the informating.
Click
here
to view a MS PowerPoint slideshow (360KB) all about
Student-Centred
Intranets and why your school should have one. And click
here to view
a multimedia presentation (video and slideshow in your browser)
giving you a Student Perspective of Stu's EduWeb. In
November 2002, a seminar titled "EduWeb: One Year Later"
was held. Over 130 teachers attended this seminar.
Click here to
find out more about it.
What Does
Stu's EduWeb Do?
In a nutshell,
EduWeb takes all the legwork out of developing a student-centred
intranet. In a typical school intranet, students submit work to a
teacher in various forms - paper, MS Word, Publisher and so on
-
the teacher then massages the work to make it fit into the
school's website or intranet and uploads several updated pages to
the webserver. It's a huge task for someone who probably
already has a full teaching load. In the end, many intranets and
school websites pass their use-by dates, too time consuming and
difficult to keep alive.
EduWeb turns the
typical school intranet process on its head. EduWeb hands
the school's intranet to its rightful owners - the students.
Yeah, right.
Ok, you can't just
let the students do their own thing with your school intranet or
you're liable to end up with hundreds of web pages about rap music
or Dragonball Z! You do need to monitor and direct their pages to ensure they
adhere to the school's website publishing guidelines. But by
giving the students perceived ownership of the intranet, you will instill many positive values and provide them with the opportunity
to responsibly manage an important school educational
resource. And the pride that is evident in students that
have published websites is reflected in higher quality content and
presentation.
And while I'm on the
advantages, there's the extra life their work suddenly
gains. Instead of a five page printed project that gets
stuck in a book or left in the bottom of a drawer, it remains
available on-line at the school for all to access for as long as
the student wants to leave it there. They can even update or
add to it - even though the project has supposedly been completed
and handed in. Students will research using the Internet
more and gain better information skills. And what about the importance of personal
expression? I could go on - and on.
Enough! How
does EduWeb do all this?
EduWeb includes an
OASIS export report that quickly and simply extracts all your student's names, grades
and classes from the NSW OASIS system, so for a start, there's no
typing in of any student names. The program then takes that
exported data and builds the base intranet pages (hundreds or
even thousands of them) in a just a minute or two. A
structured folder arrangement is automatically created with index
pages that allow you to drill down through scholastic year and
class through to each individual student and each of their
individual project pages. What's more, with EduWeb, you can
create a new intranet structure for each year while maintaining
the previous years' intranets!
The base index web
pages are neat and professionally presented while the project
pages can be totally tailored by the students, all the time maintaining
the structure's integrity. There are also special Teacher
pages so teachers can give their students instructions or work
tasks. Your students can view the
intranet using Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator and then
edit their pages simply from the browser by launching FrontPage or
Netscape Composer. Save the changes and the updated page is
immediately available! Full instructions can be found in the
Instructions and Frequently Asked Questions pages (just click
the links at left).
EduWeb 2006
At the beginning
of 2004, a brand new version of EduWeb was released which offers
all of the benefits of a student-centred intranet, but adds to it
solutions for developing an entire school intranet! School
News, Calendars, Staff Pages, Photo Galleries, Student and Staff
Links and much, much more. Take a look through the demo
school EduWeb accessible by clicking
here.
Everything you'll see in the demo was automatically generated,
some of it added to to demonstrate what you can produce very
easily with Stu's EduWeb. Also take a look at the
EduWeb Self-Paced Training
System. Each year since then, the next release of this
powerful school solution was made available. This introduces
more new features and enhancements and places EduWeb at
the forefront of student publishing and ICT integration. See
what went
into in EduWeb 2006!
Also, check out the new features that went into
EduWeb 2005.
Then when you really want to see what even Primary school students can achieve, take a look at the
REAL student work samples by clicking
here and
here.
System Requirements
Stu's EduWeb is a
Windows application, so it needs Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000 or XP or
later to
run. But the EduWeb (intranet) it creates is completely
platform independent. The created EduWeb can be stored on a
standalone PC or Apple iMac, on a Novell Netware, Windows NT/2000 or
Apple OSX or AppleShare server running from a simple folder structure, or on a
professional webserver like Apache, IntraNetware or IIS using
HTTP. Note that while the intranet structure can be fed from
one of these webserver (HTTP) systems, editing and updating the
individual intranet pages is not so simple. For this reason,
storing your EduWeb on a FILE Server is always recommended with
access via file:// protocol.
As the pages created
by EduWeb are simple HTML pages, any webpage editing tool can be
used such as FrontPage, DreamWeaver, nVu, HotDog or Mozilla
Composer.
EduWeb Credits and
Acknowledgements
Stu's EduWeb came to
me in my sleep (or lack thereof) the night after seeing an effective student-centred
intranet developed by Greg Fitzgerald at Gymea Bay Public School
(Greg
is now Principal at Cronulla South PS). Greg Sharkey, Technology Adviser from Sutherland
District was initially also involved in the GBPS setup. The only
drawback I saw with the setup was that it had to be created
manually and it took months to complete.
The following night,
a Friday, I developed the folder structure and base layout of the
web pages and button graphics together with a small dummy student
database of the type I thought I could easily make in OASIS.
In about nine hours over the Saturday and Sunday a Visual Basic
Professional 6.0 application was written which after testing
proved to do the task as intended. Monday afternoon saw the
development of the OASIS export report at Carlton Public School
which also agreed to run with EduWeb in 5th and 6th class for term
4.
Further initial testing occurred in Lake Macquarie, Bondi and
Sutherland Districts following the e-mailing of the EduWeb
software just
minutes after its completion.
EduWeb Version History