The temptation of course is to pull some sort of April Fools joke on you guys, but since my blog posts have been so rare and sparse, I thought I would try to make this post useful and profitable for you all.
First, if you are a prankster, you can get some ideas about how to add excitement (or anxiety) to those at your school. Here's the link - Top Ten Harmless Geek Pranks.
Now to something that may be useful. Adobe has released a free version of Photoshop - Adobe Photoshop Express. If you've always wanted to play with photoshop but couldn't afford it, here's the link for a new free version.
If you need some new icons, here's a link to a free package of 60 icons that you might find useful.
Now, on to some business. I will be sending out a form to the web committee that was designed earlier for judging school websites. They will be judging websites based on the criteria that has been established in years past. The specific criteria will be as follows:
- Site content (15)
- Design (10)
- Navigation (10)
- Timeliness (10)
- Parents (10)
- School Calendar (10)
- Staff Directory (10)
- Student Work (10)
- Student Resources (10)
- Legal Guidelines (5)
There will be one gold, one silver and one bronze for high schools and middle schools. There will be two of each for elementary schools. This year there will be no "Best of the Web". The four gold winners will receive $1000, silver winners will receive $500, and bronze winners will receive $300. This will not be a cash award but credit toward the purchase of technology or professional development. The winning school webmasters will select the technology or professional development of their choosing.
Lastly, I'll be soon sending out directions for selecting top teacher websites from your school. I know that you all are insanely busy, so don't spend an inordinate amount of time on this. This will be somewhat "low key" since the criteria has not been published. I'll attach a copy of the criteria that you should use. You may share this with your faculty if you wish - I hope to also have something on the teacher area of the district website. This year there will be no awards - just recognition (as in times past). In the future we will attach an award of some sort. There will be a total of 20 elementary teacher sites, 10 middle and 10 high teacher sites which will be recognized (fewer than in years past). I'll send a link to a form (as John did in the past) to make it easy to submit. We'll need to do this by the deadline that I'll send so that the web committee can select the winners. Thanks so much for all your help.
Reminder - Upstate Technology Conference will be held at JL Mann this summer (June 24-26). Please consider presenting. We will have some great presenters and fantastic keynote speakers - Ewan McIntosh and David Jakes. These are nationally know speakers who speak at the major technology conferences. I'll be presenting some preconference sessions geared specifically to Greenville County Webmasters. The UTC website is http://www.greenville.k12.sc.us/utc/
