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!
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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.

A pupil at Harrogate’s Saltergate Junior School has been declared the winner of our national Digi Designer Competition! The competition asked for schools up and down the country to design a website using the child friendly design software found in School Jotter’s ePortfolio for the chance to win an iPad Mini.

The competition received hundreds of entries, but the winner, Charlotte Durosaro, a Year 6 student at Saltergate Junior School, was awarded her prize on October 6th. Her design used a huge array of features, including the built in profile, image gallery and video embedding.

Charlotte was awarded a certificate to commend her great work and an iPad Mini to keep designing her wonderful websites on.
Although Charlotte was the overall winner, there were also two runners up, with Aman Praveenb using his excellent HTML, Java and CSS knowledge to secure a highly commended certificate and goodie bag, and a team of pupils going by the acronym SVER used their teamwork to make a great page about dogs, landing them a goodie bag each.
Webanywhere’s CEO Sean Gilligan says “We’re delighted to help find budding talent such as Charlotte and support young people developing skills for the future. Web design is a skill that children will need to learn as everything heads online – we’re proud to be supporting technology education and its evolution in the classroom. We’re delighted to see coding make it onto the curriculum, and we hope that running competitions like these shows teachers how they can combine the creative with the technical to inspire their students.”
Keep an eye on the blog for more updates about upcoming competitions, and if you’d like to try out ePortfolio yourself check out the free trial available here!

This article originally appeared in email format as part of our Jotter Tips of the Week programme – to sign up for this, click here.
An image gallery can be a great way to show off photos both of your school and events you might hold. It’s a more user-friendly way of showing these than simply displaying them as image files in an endlessly scrolling webpage. Luckily, School Jotter makes it dead-easy to insert image galleries into your website, Learnsite or ePortfolio.
First of all, you’re going to want to make sure you’ve uploaded the images you want the gallery to display. You can do this by going to Manage > My Files > Upload files from the Site editor, or by clicking the Files app in your dashboard. Drag the files into the dialog box that pops up (you might also want to put them in a specific folder, but this is up to you). Once they’re all sitting there, click “Start upload” and they should do just that. Press “OK” to finish.

That’s actually the hardest part of this task done! All you have to do now is go to the page you want the gallery to be on while in Editing mode, then click Insert > Gallery.

You’ll be asked where you want to put it on the page, then you’ll see the following dialog box pop up. Navigate to wherever it was you uploaded your images and click the blue “select” button on each, then click “Choose”.

The default settings are probably fine, but you can adjust the sizes of the thumbnails, captions and more by using the grey bar which appears at the top of the page when you click on the Gallery in edit mode.

You can adjust the order the images appear in, or add more images, by clicking on the three dots in the grey bar at the top, shown here to the left of “Captions”.

And that’s all there is to it! You can add any image you like to galleries, and you can have as many galleries as you want – use them to make your site look even better.

To celebrate Black History month in the UK, we here at Webanywhere thought it would be a great idea to help teachers by providing lesson plans around the theme of black history. So below are two ideas for lessons you can lead to help share knowledge about black history:

1. Mary Seacole – KS3

A brilliant example of why Black History month is so important, Mary Seacole was a Jamaican woman who assisted soldiers during the Crimean War, but was seldom talked about prior to more modern curriculums. A great way to start a lesson about Mary Seacole would be to show this video to the class and then discuss what we learn about Mary Seacole and her role in history. Why might she have been ignored?

Once you’ve had a discussion, split the class up into groups and have each group do some research about Mary Seacole and find out what people think about her and what happened; you can find a useful interactive guide to Mary Seacole here for a start. This exercise should help reinforce ideas of how to do independent research, as well as looking at how people can manipulate history to create a narrative. Ask students about how reliable they think their sources are, why some people might hold certain views and encourage critical thinking.
Due to the subject matter and surrounding controversy with this lesson, be sure to do it with older students who are expected to be able to form their own conclusions and not be easily mislead – Mary Seacole has a lot of controversy surrounding her addition to the History curriculum, so some online resources might need to be checked to make sure they’re appropriate. At the end of the lesson, have students write about what Mary Seacole shows us about how people might manipulate resources for their own agendas.
Also, for a bit of fun, Horrible Histories also did a great song if you have some time at the end of lesson.

2. Great Inventors! – KS1 & KS2

There are plenty of notable black inventors & innovators, and what better way to encourage students to learn about them than with a day showing off some of their inventions! The Black Inventor Online Museum has a vast library of information on black inventors. Here are a few activity ideas:

• George Washington Carver invented over 1,000 uses for the peanut! How many uses can your students think up? Carver’s uses included shampoo, facial cream and even ink! Encourage students to think outside the box when asked to do tasks.
• Match-up!  Get pictures of each of the inventors (along with their name as a caption) and create some matching invention cards. Then get students to guess who made what, and encourage them to remember the names. This is a simple activity, but it’s a great way to help students remember inventors, and that in itself is a way to help make black figures in history become more commonplace.
• Lewis Latimer improved on the lightbulb, and invented a version that lasted longer and was safer to use. What other inventions do your pupils think could be improved, and what would be the benefit? Encourage the idea that things can be improved with careful thought.

These lesson ideas should help you broaden the horizons of your pupils, and encourage positive attitudes to viewing and studying black history.
Lesson plans just like this one can be easily made and shared using our Resources App in School Jotter, which acts as a repository for files, quizzes and lessons. Thanks for reading and enjoy Black History Month!

A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website, which is often organised into a structured hierarchy. It’s useful to have, not only for when people want to be able to find all of the pages, but it helps Google, Bing and other search engines index your site so when people search for you they can easily find it. Continue reading →