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!
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!
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.
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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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!
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!
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.
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!