So recently I helped launch a large-scale weblog system for a preschool, elementary school, and high school in Chicago.
It was an interesting project for a number of reasons:
- We use the TypePad hosted weblog solution (2 separate accounts) to manage 20 High School teacher websites, 11 High School Sport Sites, 20 Elementary School Teacher Sites, and 6 Preschool Sites
- We publish the “Subscribe via My Yahoo!” button for each teacher site and really try to get parents to understand the advantages of RSS
- I created three separate training course (High School Administrators,High School Teachers, and Elementary/ Preschool teachers) and trainedover 80 people on the system
- I made great use of Advanced Templates to make site administrationeasy over time. For instance, I have one template drive the content foreach of the major subsites (i.e. one for the High School sports, onefor Elementary School teachers, etc.)
- The Director of IT for the Parish, Sr. Deidre Jordy, came up with an ingenious way to pull TypePad posts into an i-frame for the High School site,which allowed her to absolutely control the design and make it“non-webloggy”. The page is written in a combination of HTML,Javascript, and PHP. The heart of the navigation is the two-dimensionalarray at the top of the page. The two dimensions are section and page,which are also the two variables passed in the URL to invoke the page.All you have to do to change the navigation is to change the URL valuein that array and the navigation is changed everywhere, both on the topnav bar and in the side nav
- The teachers are all really keeping their own sites up to date withthe normal assignments and classroom updates. Some are taking extrasteps in linking to further learning material with complex animations, adding images, and using their weblog as a tool for unveiling the learning as time goes by.
- Sport sites are able to keep everyone up to date with the most recent scores,
- Parish site is next