We’ve had a couple of people now ask us how to use the free Calendar feature in Jotter Site. It’s a really popular feature, present on hundreds of our websites already, but it can be a bit confusing to set up, so we’re here to guide you through it.
If you’ve ever used a calendar app before, whether it’s Google Docs, Microsoft Outlook or Apple’s Calendar, the interface should be immediately familiar to you, but it can take some time to learn where things are and what they’re known as in Jotter.

It can look a bit daunting at first, so we’ll go over it piece by piece.

• Add Event – This button, at the top, lets you create an event or reminder
• Add Calendar – This button lets you create calendars – sort of a category within the main app, that helps with organisation.

And then the options at the side:

• Your calendars – Your calendars will appear here, you can click them to toggle their display on the panel to the right.
• Settings – Change the important things
• Recycle Bin – Where deleted calendars go

We’ll start with Add Calendar – this is the simplest and easiest thing to do, and will really help you with both getting information out and categorising it at the back.

The name is the name of the calendar, and the description is, well, self-explanatory. I’ve categorised mine into “Clubs and Performances”, “Parents’ Evenings” and “PE” – all things parents might like to know about, though of course what you do is your own choice! Next, let’s have a look at Add Event.
This is a bit more complex than the last one, so we’ll go over it bit by bit again.

• Calendar – Specify which calendar you’d like the event attached to
• Title – What you want to call the event
• Start date, start time, end date, end time – When the event will begin and end, or alternatively check All Day for all-day events.
• Repeat – Set how often the event will repeat, if it’s a repeat event – see below
• Where – The location
• Description – What people will see when they click on the event
• Colour – You can colour-code events to make the calendar a bit easier to read

The Repeat dialog can be a bit daunting, so here’s a run-down of that
Again, we’ll go by it bit by bit:

• Repeat – whether you’d like it done daily, weekly, monthly or yearly
• Every – how many of those time intervals should pass between each event
• Repeat on – which days you’d like
• Starts – the first instance of the event
• Ends – The end conditions for it – whether it’s endless, ends on a specific date or after a set number of occurrences.

You’ll get a handy summary at the bottom of what you’ve selected – you can see my event is set to repeat every two weeks on Tuesday and Wednesday for 10 weeks.
Once that’s done, just press Create Event to send it all live. Made a mistake? Don’t worry, by clicking on the event in the calendar view you’ll be able to make edits to specific instances or even entire series of events.
Now let’s take a look at the Settings page. This is where you can start to get really fancy with what you’re doing.

Here you can import or export your calendars to use in whatever app you’d like.

• Edit details – Change the description or name of a calendar
• Share – Determine which groups can edit your calendars – you might want to give the PTA special access to an events calendar, for example
• Export – Export the calendar in iCal format, for use in your app of choice
• Import – Take an iCal file and put it into Calendar
• Delete – Remove the calendar to the Recycle Bin
• Public URL – create a text string you can use to import an automatically-updating calendar feed in your personal calendar app.

Okay, so you have a calendar now, and it’s looking great. Putting it on your website, ePortfolio or Learnsite is really easy, just go to the page in Edit mode and click Insert Item, then Calendar.

Then you’ll see this dialog:

Choose the ones you want to display using the buttons at the top (you can pick more than one!), then click Choose, and there you have it, your calendar is embedded. Anyone can scroll through the embedded calendar using the controls at the top, including viewing things on a per-week or even per-day basis! You can change the default view using the grey bar at the top of the screen when in Edit mode and the calendar is selected.

Want to receive tips like this one straight to your inbox? Sign up here for our free, weekly Jotter tips emails, or contact us at education@webanywhere.co.uk.

Bullying is a huge problem in schools (and elsewhere) despite massive strides made in the last few decades. We’ve compiled some of the more shocking statistics about bullying into this useful infographic, which you’re free to use. Click the image for the full-size version.

Continue reading →

You might remember, six months ago, how all the blogs about school websites (us included) – and indeed all websites – were talking about Google’s impending “Mobilegeddon” – the change in their ranking algorithm that would prioritise mobile-friendly websites and penalise those that aren’t mobile compatible. No doubt you received countless emails from providers (ourselves included, again), offering to fix the problem, but six months on we have to ask – was it a genuine threat to your website?
The short answer is “no, but….”, and the long answer is “yes, and…”. The reasons for this are due to a number of trends in the way people are accessing content, and the long and short of it is that, from here on out, things are only going to get worse for non-mobile-friendly websites.

Changes in browsing habits

The traditional model of browsing on your desktop, with Google results in front of you and websites tucked comfortably behind the tabs or windows of your screen, is in decline. Even since April, Android traffic alone has gone up by as much as 6% by some metrics – invariably at the expense of desktop searches. This means that parents are more likely to be searching for things like schools from a mobile device.
In this environment, your content needs to work on these devices, and not just function but look great while doing it. This is why we really do recommend a responsive website, and it’s worth pointing out that School Jotter 2 customers needn’t worry about these changes – all their websites are responsive straight out of the box, with easy access from any device you choose. Content will change and adapt to suit the screen size, so it doesn’t matter if you’re using a 27” iMac or a 3.5” Android phone – you’ll get the same content, tailored to your device.
The reality of the situation is that you need to be going where the people are, and increasingly they’re on their tablets and phones.

Google’s changes are gradual

I want to be clear here – Mobilegeddon was a real thing, with real effects, it just wasn’t as bad as everyone said, but the important thing here is “yet”. April was the beginning of a longer process which will slowly see mobile-friendly designs becoming the new normal, transitioning from a luxury to a general fact of life. By upgrading your site to a responsive theme, you’ll be getting around this; by staying non-responsive things are only going to get worse for your rankings.

The overall picture

Your website needs to work on the phones of parents, teachers and students, and if it doesn’t you’re missing out. Not just in terms of your slowly-decreasing search engine traffic, but in terms of providing a decent browsing experience to the people who need it most.
Interested in getting a responsive, mobile-friendly website? School Jotter provides responsive themes out of the box, contact us for a free trial.

Many teachers will be looking for Bonfire Night teaching resources in the run up to the 5th of November. Here we have put together some of the best pages and websites with ideas for lesson plans on Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, including KS1, 2 and 3 activities, sequencing pictures and video. These resources may be useful for History or Literacy lesson planning.

Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot Resources

This is a Webanywhere post with lesson ideas and activities to help you teach the story of Guy Fawkes.
There are 5 downloadable Gunpowder plot activities – a Classroom Presentation, a Word Search, a Gunpowder Plot sequencing activity, a Writing exercise, and an Artwork activity.
The pack includes content aimed at students in the Foundation Stage, Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2, and Key Stage 3. Hopefully, this means you’ll find something to adapt or use, whatever school age group you teach in Primary or early Secondary.

The Gunpowder Plot Part 1 – Stories from Parliament

A history video from Parliament.uk aimed at KS2 and 3. Using illustrations, this video describes the first part of the 1605 plot to kill King James I and destroy Parliament. You can also find Part 2 of this Assembly and Lesson plan video by clicking here.

TES Gunpowder Plot Lesson Plans

More from the Parliament Education Service, the TES website has collated some downloadable PDF worksheets and activities for those teaching children about Bonfire Night and the origin of ‘Penny for the Guy’.

Twinkl Bonfire Night Resources

A range of highly visual teaching resources on Bonfire Night, the Gunpowder Plot, and Fireworks. There are sequencing activities, PowerPoint presentations, videos, quizzes, posters and control sheets.

We hope you find these lesson resources useful! Could you or your school benefit from an online tool to manage and share teaching resources? Check out the Learn App, which allows you to create a Learning Site that fully integrates with your school website.

Over on Schoolanywhere.co.uk we’ve been taking a look at homework workloads and how to make it all just that bit more managable. We’ve examined three different areas that people can struggle with in homework: managing stress, getting it done and marking it. We even have a podcast all about it!

Handling Homework Workload

The first blog of the month took a look at managing stress. With a focus on how teachers can help students, the rule of time-management is ultimately what came out as the most important factor, with things such as eating properly and staying positive also making the list. You can find the full blog here:
How teachers can help to handle homework stress

How to get Students to do their Homework

The second in our series of blogs examined how to get students to complete their homework. While it’s all very well to blame the student for their missed deadlines, it’s sometimes worth remembering that being set up to fail can be in the hands of the teacher. Planned workloads with fair expectations can help motivate a learner into engaging, rather than shutting down when feeling overwhelmed. Combine this with varied and interesting assignments that reinforce the learning done in lessons and you can help students get their work done. The full blog is here:
Getting Homework Done

How to Mark Homework

Finally, the third blog took a look at the research of Dr Rod Ellis and his various models for marking work. The theories he examines explain how you can turn the feedback process into one that also engages with a student’s learning process, and rather than just outlining the correct answers, actually engage them into learning afresh once marking has been handed back. The blog, along with a link to the full lecture, can be found here:
How to Mark Homework

Podcast

Of course if you’d rather not spend time reading these blogs and would like to have them read to you, the inaugural episode of the Webanywhere Podcast is now live, where I go through each of the blogs and discuss what they mean and how you can implement some of the better ideas. Podcast link is below:

That just about wraps it up for Homework month, next month we’ll be examining anti-bullying, and tackling issues around cyber bullying in schools. Until then, thanks for checking out homework month!

This is something that a lot of people might not be aware of – School Jotter includes some simple, easy-to-use tracking tools right within its interface. There’s no need to set up complicated Google Analytics tracking profiles, you can get the relevant information from right within Jotter Site itself!
This is something that’s actually really easy to set up, you just need to log into the Jotter backend, go to your site and click Manage > Web Stats.

And that’s pretty much all there is to it! After clicking that, you’ll see the following screen:

You can drill down by page, to see where people are visiting on your website, as well as on what days. The arrows at the top let you change which month you’re looking at, and you can also see a longer-term picture with the “Year” tab to the left.

What these figures mean

There can sometimes be a bit of confusion over the difference between Hits and Visits:

• Hits – Number of times a web page has been loaded
• Visits – The number of unique visitors to your school website – one visitor can generate multiple hits through refreshes, hence why the hits number is always a bit higher.

By properly paying attention to your web stats you can work out the behaviour-flow of site visitors and plan out your content accordingly.

Last week we showed you how to use Jotter site to send email updates to parents. This week we’ll be covering how you can use Site to upload and disseminate newsletters.
As with last week, you’re going to want to go into Edit mode then click Manage, but this time we’re going into News.

Clicking it will bring up the dialogue box below – it’s empty by default, but I pre-populated mine with some content a few months back. The two big options are Add News and News Categories. The former is for content, the latter for organisation, we’ll deal with the latter first, to give us a nice framework.

Categories are handy both for organising your content in the backend, and also for specifying feeds later on. Adding them is just a matter of clicking News Categories, then clicking Add News Category to get the following view. Fill it out with relevant information (for example, you might want a category for sporting achievements, or for upcoming school trips).

We can now go back to the main news dialogue and click Add News to begin crafting our news item.

Here’s a brief overview of each section:

• Category: The category you specified earlier
• Title: What you want the title of your post to be
• Description: Flavour text, displayed as an overview of the story
• Content: The main body, where your news item will go
• Image: If you want to illustrate your story, you can attach an image

When you’re done, click Add News. Now you need somewhere to publish it. Go to the page you’d like to insert your news feed on and, in Edit mode, click Insert Item, then News.

By default, the box you put in will automatically display the five most recent news items you’ve created, including their titles and descriptions. Clicking on the news box while in edit mode will bring up the following bar at the top of your page.

You can customise this box with the drop-down menus as follows:

• Type: Whether you want the news box to be active or archived – if you have a dedicated news page, you might wish to display news from the past with less information.
• Category: The category you created earlier – by default it will pull through all news
• Image: Whether or not the articles have images next to them
• Articles: How many pieces of news will display by default
• Pagination: On dedicated news websites, setting this to “on” will automatically load new pages when you reach the bottom of the current one

As you can see, you can customise this to look pretty much any way you like!
Want tips like this one delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up to our Jotter Tips mailing list here!

Webanywhere provide school web design in the East Midlands, throughout the UK, and beyond. We have provided learning platforms, websites and useful education apps to many schools across Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire and Rutland.
On this post, we’ll be looking at just a few examples of great school websites in the East Midlands of England, all made with School Jotter – the website builder and suite of apps for education providers.

Martinshaw Primary School in Leicester

Martinshaw Primary in Leicestershire has a beautiful website that blends images of their school with their green surroundings. A gallery of images on their homepage showcases their outside spaces and facilities.
The homepage also shows the school’s awards and accreditations, while a calendar feed and latest news section keep visitors informed.
This Leicester school website can be seen at: https://www.martinshaw.leics.sch.uk/

St John’s C of E Primary School in Nottingham

This Nottinghamshire school has a smart and vibrant website design that quickly signposts visitors to useful information. The main menu uses drop-downs to easily navigate to deeper pages of the site, while a section on the left shows excerpts from a recent Ofsted report and allows parents to download a school prospectus.
The homepage is used to provide a warm welcome from the headteacher.
Visit the website to learn more: https://www.st-johns.notts.sch.uk/

Grampian Primary School in Derby

This Derbyshire primary has a fun and colourful school website design, welcoming visitors with some friendly robots! There are information feeds from Twitter and their latest news section.
Lots of images on the homepage, including a slideshow, give visitors a great introduction to the school and its surroundings.
View the website of Grampian Primary School in Derby at: https://www.grampianprimary.org.uk/

Can We Help You?

Are you looking for school website design in or near Derby, Leicester, Lincoln or Nottingham, elsewhere in the UK, or even further afield? Since 2003, we’ve helped thousands of clients worldwide to create fantastic looking school websites, packed with useful apps and features, and which are easy for their teachers and support staff to maintain. We provide full training in using School Jotter and of course we’re always here if you need support.
Browse the site for more on school websites and our range of education products and services. You can learn more about our school website builder at www.schooljotter.com or why not contact us for a no-obligations discussion of your needs?

Webanywhere provide school web design in Yorkshire, throughout the UK, and beyond. We have provided websites to literally hundreds of schools across North, South, East and West Yorkshire. On this post, we’ll be looking at just a few examples of great school websites in Yorkshire, all made with School Jotter – the site builder and suite of apps for education providers.

Birstwith C of E Primary School, North Yorkshire

This beautiful Church of England primary school located in the North Yorkshire countryside use photographs of their local surroundings for the backdrop of their website. They’ve included a slideshow of pupil photos and a warm welcome from their headteacher.
The homepage integrates a feed of the weekly newsletter and visitors are encouraged to follow the school on Twitter.
This North Yorkshire school website can be seen at: https://www.birstwith.n-yorks.sch.uk/

Great Heights Cluster, Bradford

This school cluster website introduces 8 primary schools and one secondary school in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The site explains how these schools work together on projects that aim to enhance Teaching & Learning, Leadership & Management, and Community Cohesion.
The cluster school website design signposts visitors to joint initiatives and useful information, such as e-safety links and upcoming events, while also taking visitors to any of the member schools.
Visit the website to learn more: https://greatheights.org/

Knavesmire Primary School, York

This colourful primary school website design signposts essential visitor information quickly and effectively through a set of drop down menus. There are additional feeds from Twitter and an upcoming events schedule, and an integrated Google Map opens up to help you find the school.
The site uses a gallery of large images from in and around the school on their homepage.
View the website of Knavesmire Primary School in York at: https://www.knavesmireprimary.co.uk/

Can We Help You?

Are you looking for school website design in Yorkshire, elsewhere in the UK, or even further afield? Since 2003, we’ve helped thousands of clients worldwide to create fantastic looking school websites, packed with useful apps and features, and which are easy for their teachers and support staff to maintain. We provide full training in using School Jotter and of course we’re always here if you need support.
Browse the site for more on school websites and our range of education products and services. You can learn more about our school website builder at www.schooljotter.com or why not contact us for a no-obligations discussion of your needs?

Parents want to know what’s happening at your school – what’s the best way to tell them? In the past it was crumpled sheets of A4 hastily stuffed into folders and rucksacks, to hopefully be handed to parents a few weeks later. Luckily, your website lets you manage this in a much easier way. Two ways, in fact! This week we’ll be looking at email newsletters, and next week we’ll cover news items.

Part One: Newsletters

Newsletters are emails you can send out to your subscriber list. Setting them up couldn’t be simpler either.
First, you’re going to want to create some Newsletters in your Jotter Site backend. Log in, visit your homepage and click on the Manage tab, then click “Newsletters”.

You’ll see the following screen, showing a list of any emails you might have created – by default though, this will be blank. You’ll notice two options at the top: Add Newsletter and Subscriptions.

First, we’ll look at the subscriptions area, this is where you manage who the emails will go to.

We’ll go through the buttons at the top in order now:

• Add subscription – Allows you to manually input a username and email
• Download spreadsheet – Lets you export your subscribers to a CSV file
• Import spreadsheet – Lets you import a CSV of names and email addresses

Additionally, you can edit and unsubscribe individual addresses manually by using the Edit and Unsubscribe links to the right of each field.
Please note, you can only have the one address book, so we recommend using it for parents and interested parties.
Now we can go back and look at the Add Newsletter dialogue
To anyone who’s used an email client before, this should be pretty straightforward:

• Title: The subject line of the email you want to send
• Description: The text and content you’d like to include in the email
• Date: When you plan to send the email
• File attachment: Used for things like images or PDFs

Once that’s filled in and saved, all you need to do is click “Email to subscribers” on the main newsletter screen (the second image), and confirm you want to send it. And that’s it, you’re done! Next week, we’ll be showing you how to embed newsletters into your site, for a self-updating page.
Want to receive tips like this straight to your inbox? Sign up here! To read part two of this tutorial, click here.