Flagship Schools: Bush Hill Park from Webanywhere on Vimeo.

A few months back we attended the launch party for one of our websites at Bush Hill Park in London, and were really overwhelmed by the positive responses we received from parents, teachers and students. BHP is one of our first “uber” themes – a new type of theme designed to be on the cutting edge of web design. These fully-responsive school websites feature large images spanning their pages, bold colours and a tile-based system of navigation.

Whether you’re on a PC, phone or tablet, the Bush Hill Park website is very easy to navigate. There’s no fiddly menus or awkward links to click, and all information is quickly available behind the tiles or large options. The use of icons on buttons also helps out the parents at the school – a relatively large number of whom do not speak English as a first language (also available is the option to Google Translate all pages – a feature standard on all Jotter sites).
It’s not just about what you can see on the surface though – Bush Hill Park make use of the full range of School Jotter apps. Whether the pupils are building their own Portfolios, learning from Learn or sharing information on Forums, all can be done from within the School Jotter environment. While the parents can easily navigate the external-facing website, students and teachers can take full advantage of our internal-facing apps.
It was a great privilege to be able to attend the launch of one of our customers’ websites, and that it was of such a high quality really was the icing on the cake. We’re really proud of what we’ve been able to achieve working with Bush Hill Park, and wish them the best of luck going forward.

Want to learn more about School Jotter and all its features? Got 2 minutes? You won’t even need that:

School Jotter is the easiest, most powerful and most reliable school website builder, editor and learning app platform. Designed to be easy to use but full of features that go beyond expectations, School Jotter makes designing a professional looking school website a cinch.

Plus it can host an array of learning apps, including Blogs, Portfolio, Forums, Broadcast, Learn and MIS Portal. It can integrate fully with SIMS as well as Office 365, OneDrive and Google Apps.

In our “What is…?” series we move onto looking at the apps that are available in School Jotter, Webanywhere’s very own school website creator. As the number 1 platform in the UK for school websites, we wanted to help explain why the suite is so popular, starting by asking the question: “What is… The Blog App?”
Continue reading →

If you want your website to stand out from the crowd, using video could be the way to go. If a picture paints a thousand words, as the saying goes, imagine how much more you can communicate on film!
Web video has never been so popular, with 72 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube alone every minute. We’ve seen our School Jotter community enthusiastically adopting this trend – particularly the use of video tours of their schools. It’s really simple to upload your own videos to Jotter, and nowadays most schools have access to filming and editing equipment.

If you want a little help however, we do offer a video production service to schools, including planning, filming, editing and publishing your video. Here are a couple of examples of recent videos we’ve produced. You can see more on our Vimeo channel: http://vimeo.com/webanywhere
(if you’d like us to make your school video – email Dave at david.smith@webanywhere.co.uk)

Why not make your School Jotter site stand out with one of our engaging video tours?
Show prospective parents around your school, have children present their latest projects or even interview teachers, or produce a video for twinning projects.
Video can show your school’s individuality and add that special touch to your site. Here is a selection of different styled videos for you to take a look at.

St Francis Catholic Primary School in Bradford used our professional video production service to show off the school’s location to their partner school in America. Pupils helped with the video by writing and presenting their own descriptions of different parts of Bradford, St Francis School and their local church.

Overthorpe C of E Primary School in Dewsbury weaved their school song into the video by having children singing the lyrics at different parts around their school. The lyrics to the song were added as text  to create a sing-a-long video.

Sandal Primary School in Baildon wanted to show the different activities going on at their school. A small group of pupils guide the viewer through a day in the life of their school, including a rugby match, a music lesson and a bakery class.

Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Primary School in Leeds wanted a video which would help capture children in their learning environment. The video showed all areas of the school including the tennis and ICT club.

To get a video tour for your school, please contact us, or click here to find out more about our professional video production services.