Website of the week – Colebrook Junior School

Published: February 29, 2016

Another great website of the week. This week we are looking at the website created by the Colebrook Junior School based in Swindon, Wiltshire.

The website design looks professional and the colourful logos make it look child-friendly. The homepage features a slideshow with nice pictures of students. What makes this website unique is that there is very little information on the homepage. I guess we are used to seeing schools trying to add all the information related to school on the homepage. It’s nice to see that this school is trying something different.

I like how the school made their website really easy to navigate and easy to find all the relevant information. There are five links to the main pages, including ‘School Information’, ‘Curriculum’, ‘Gallery’, ‘Parents’ and ‘Class Information’. I believe that’s all the information that students, school staff and parents need. Main contact details can be found at the top right corner. Again, very easy to find for anyone who requires more information about the school.

Overall, a unique and great looking website created by the Colebrook Junior School. Well done!

Website of the Week – Guardian Angels Catholic Primary School

Published: February 22, 2016

What a great looking website! Bright colours, beautiful images and the overall theme that definitely goes well with the school name “Guardian Angels”. That’s why this school website has been selected as the website of the week. Guardian Angels Catholic Primary School is based in Birmingham, West Midlands and it seems to be really focused on striving for educational excellence through high expectations, quality teaching and stimulating environment.

Yellow colour seems to be dominating throughout the website which makes sense because this colour represents the school uniforms. The layout of the website is clear and it is easy to navigate. The homepage features some nice pictures of children alongside the links to the main pages. The menu bar includes links to other pages where you can find all the information regarding students, learning materials and the school life in general.

I really like how the school website includes links to useful websites and other online learning materials for pupils. They can be found under ‘Pupil Page’. It’s great to see that the school is using our Spellings app! ‘School events’ page  features pictures from previous school events and trips. This is a great way for engaging with pupils, parents and the wider community.

I’m very impressed with this website of the week that has been created by Guardian Angels Catholic Primary School. Well done!

Now fully available for your school – Office 365 integration

Published: February 18, 2016

We’re pleased to announce that Office 365 integration is now fully up and running for anyone using our School Jotter platform. You can now take advantage of the full range of Office 365 features within the School Jotter ecosystem, complete with single-sign-on and file sharing.
Here’s the best new features of integration:

Single sign-on

And it really is single sign-on – with the Office 365 login method, if you’re logged into Office 365 you won’t need to enter anything to get into School Jotter, your computer will handle it all.

Easily add files to your website

Access your OneDrive files from within Jotter, and insert them as items on your School Jotter website. This means you don’t have to worry about taking an image from OneDrive, downloading it then reuploading it to Jotter – it’s right there already!

Outlook Calendar Synchronisation

It’s likely that your school has everything organised in an Outlook calendar already – wouldn’t it be great if this could automatically pull through to your website? The Calendar app can now read from and update from your Office 365 calendars, saving you one more update task.

All your OneDrive files in School Jotter

With the Office 365 desktop app, you and your students can even have access to your desktop files in School Jotter.

Share and collaborate

As well as accessing your own files, you can even share them with others, making it a great way to enable collaboration amongst students.
Interested in the benefits of integration? Contact us for a free demo.

The new accordion feature in School Jotter

Category: Customer Training

Published:

We released an update to School Jotter last week, and it’s added a few new things which I’ll be covering in the coming weeks.
The first new object we’ll be looking at is the (rather strangely-named) Accordion. It’s a great way to create an information-packed page that also embraces minimalism and interactivity. As with all School Jotter objects, you can find it from the Insert menu in Edit mode.

Choose where you want to put it. The accordion will look like a series of headings that stretch across the space allocated to them. They look, once populated with content, something like this:

Clicking a title expands it, as I’ve done with the third and fifth options here. Let’s go back to the Insert page.

Once you’ve inserted your accordion into the page you’ll see this screen. By default there are three sections in the left-most column, but you can add more with the green plus button below. Otherwise, there are three areas to consider:

  • Accordion title: The title of the section people can click to expand
  • Accordion text: The text revealed when clicking on a section
  • Select image: If you’d like to put an image in, you can

Press OK and your accordion will go live. And that’s all there is to it! If you’d like to see the accordions in action, you can visit my School Jotter page at cierandouglass.schooljotter2.com. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!
You might want to use them for class information; we find they work particularly well as templates for FAQs. They’re a really useful tool and we’re pleased they’re now available in School Jotter.
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Website of the Week – North Featherstone Junior and Infant School

Published: February 15, 2016

This week’s website of the week comes to us from the North Featherstone Junior and Infant School based in Pontefract, West Yorkshire. This school believes in “excellence through enjoyment” and it seems to be really focused on making sure that all children feel safe, valued and included in the school life.

I really like the slideshow with some nice pictures of students on the homepage. These pictures go very well with the overall style and the colours of the website. I wish the school added more pictures as it is a great way to learn more about school life without having to search for image gallery. What is more, having images of students on the homepage can help to create the feeling that the website is personalised for children which is a great way of encouraging them to use the website more.

The website layout makes finding everything you need very easy. The main contact details can be found at the top right corner. One of the things that the school did really well was highlighting some of the main pages and putting them in the middle of the homepage with some nice icons. ‘Calendar’ page is very useful in terms of helping students, parents and teachers to stay up to date with school events and other important dates. What is more, the ‘Classes’ page is useful for finding all information relevant for each class.

I think this school website is an example of keeping a website very simple but still making it look good. Well done to North Featherstone Junior and Infant School!

Website of the week – Pinehurst Primary School

Published: February 8, 2016

We’ve got another great website of the week that has been created by Pinehurst Primary School based in Liverpool, Merseyside. Great design, a lot of good content and relevant information are some of the main features that a good school website needs, and this school did a really good job!

I think this school website has a very unique design. It seems that the homepage includes quite a lot of different features while still looking organised and easy to navigate. You can notice the school values as soon as you open the website. They are followed by the photo gallery with some nice pictures of students and the information about school.

There is a useful navigation bar for finding information and a language bar which translates website into any language you need. I really like how the school included ‘latest news’ and ‘upcoming events’ on the homepage. It’s nice to see that the school is regularly updating these two sections with latest news and events. This information can help engage with students, parents and the wider community. What is more, the school has included a link to their Twitter page and a live Twitter feed which is another great way for engaging with everyone.

Overall, a really well-designed primary school website with great content. Well done to Pinehurst Primary!

Website of the week- Brockholes C of E Junior and Infant School

Published: February 1, 2016

Another great website of the week! This week we are looking at the website created by Brockholes C of E Junior and Infant School based in the village of Brockholes, West Yorkshire. It is a Church School that has been recognised by Ofsted as being an outstanding school in terms of the quality of teaching and the exemplary attitudes that children have towards their learning.
The site is designed with colourful illustrations of trees, play areas and children. A great way to add some colours to the website and to make it appealing to children! The homepage also features some images of the school life with links to other pages.
School website is very easy to navigate and there is a navigation bar which makes finding the information you need even easier. The main contact details can be easily found at the top of the homepage and more contact details can be found in the ‘About Us’ page.

I always say that it’s great when schools add their social media links on the website because it helps to engage with students and parents more. Brockholes School has included links to their Twitter and Facebook accounts on the homepage; you can also see the Twitter feed on the homepage which is great for gaining more followers. Another nice feature on the school website, is the school vision video that can be found on the homepage.
Well done to the Brockholes School for demonstrating the flexibility of School Jotter’s school web designs and for creating this good-looking and informative website.

Webanywhere At Bett 2016 | Webanywhere Blog

Published: January 26, 2016

Bett 2016 is over! Webanywhere team had an amazing time at the event and everyone is talking about new ideas for the next year already. All about making our stand better each year!

This years’ event had some exciting speakers, great exhibitors, and fantastic demonstrations, all of which were aiming to increase the awareness of new educational technologies and to provide information how schools can introduce or improve their use of technology inside and outside of the classroom.

Our stand was very busy throughout all days of the event and it was great meeting so many lovely teachers, parents and students. We loved showing our amazing products to everyone and we hope that all event visitors managed to find the best education technology solutions for their schools. Our education experts tried to introduce the benefits of our products to as many event visitors as possible. I’m sure Webanywhere team attracted some schools that will become long-term clients.

To make Bett more engaging and to give something back to some of you, we had some amazing giveaways on our stand. We gave away four giant Toblerones that received a lot of attention and four ipads mini. Congratulations to everyone who won!

Let’s not forget our special guest – Webbber – the Webanywhere meerkat. Everyone agrees that Webber was great at attracting visitors to our stand. I’m sure he made Bett more enjoyable for event visitors as well as for the Webanywhere team. We might invite him to join us next year as well:)

What Webanywhere team said:

For me it was an opportunity to meet and bond with my work colleagues that I see so rarely as a remote worker. I was able to share my experiences and expertise and this was reciprocated in bucket-loads by the team. To also have Cieran and Sally as the ‘glue’ to keep the whole show moving effortlessly added that extra layer of professionalism that Webanywhere exuded the whole week!”

“Best part was being able to work with colleagues who I don’t usually work with”

“The best thing for me was the noticeable shift in attitudes schools have towards VLE’s. People are starting to curiously explore what they can do and realise they can offer a whole lot of exciting opportunities to schools (and save them a bunch of time)”

Being Webber was really good fun

“For me one of the best things about the BETT experience for WA was seeing a ‘team’ evolve out of several new starters within the group. Sometimes this takes a long while but being in a group at a show like BETT speeds up that process. It was also great to see the new starters develop their product knowledge skills and grow in such a short period of time”

“It was like 4 days of speed-dating with people who we share a common interest with” 

It was brilliant to meet with so many teachers from across the world, I think the running total is 49 countries on our stand”

Thanks to everyone who visited the Webanywhere stand at Bett 2016 and to everyone who helped to organise it. And of course, well done to Webanywhere team!:)

Website of the week – Highbury School

Published: January 25, 2016

This week’s Website of the Week comes to us from an extraordinary school based in Brighouse, West Yorkshire. Highbury is a community primary school providing for children from two to eleven years who have a range of special educational needs that could not be met in regular schools.
My first thought when I saw this website was that it looks really good. Warm colours, animal illustrations and images of children make this website look very child-friendly which is what we would expect from a primary school website. Highbury school did a really good job making the website look child-friendly and still very professional at the same time.


Website is really easy to navigate. You can find the main contact details at the top of the page which is very useful. Another great thing about this website is the navigation bar which makes finding information even easier. The ‘About Us’ page includes information about school, its values and other useful information. The main information concerning students and parents can be found under ‘General Information’ and ‘Parents and Carers’ pages.
All children are divided into classes that are named after different animals which is a very nice way to engage with students. Illustrations of all animals can be found on the homepage and those illustrations direct you to the blogs of each class. Each blog features information regarding latest events and news about classes.
Another extraordinary school and another great looking primary school website. Congratulations to Highbury School!

Third Day At Bett 2016 | Webanywhere Blog

Category: Company News,Events

Published: January 22, 2016

Another busy and successful day at Bett 2016. Today we are looking at some highlights of the third day of the event. One more day to go and Bett 2016 will be over. One more chance to meet our education experts for some demos and learn all about our education products.

Webber – the Webanywhere meerkat was extremely popular today! It was great seeing him surrounded by children (and some adults of course).   The giant Toblerone is getting more and more attention every day, and you still have a chance to win one of our giveaways tomorrow. Visit us at stand F350, all we need to do is scan your badge for free entry!

We’re really looking forward to meeting all the children taking over the ExCel arena tomorrow: Saturday is all about #KidsMeet! A new blog post with all Bett 2016 updates coming next week. Thanks to everyone who visited our stand today!