Dunsville Primary School near Doncaster chose a bright, colourful theme for their School Jotter website. It means visitors have a fun and engaging introduction to the school. In fact, the School Jotter website is so appealing, other schools often reference it when their own School Jotter websites are being designed!
The colours and the design of the Dunsville website echoes the content of the website: basically, it’s all about the children. From the uploaded photographs of pupils’ efforts in the Children’s Work section, to a downloadable copy of their child protection proceedures, it’s clear that Dunsville has the pupils’ interests and development at heart. The Ofsted report from 2010, that can be found in the About Us section, sums this up perfectly: “The manner in which it cares for its pupils is exemplary.” The Pupil Premium section even goes one step further – and shows how much money per pupil the school receives per year.
Dunsville Primary School’s School Jotter website depicts a completely transparent, learner-focused establishment. Great when attracting new pupils!
You can view their website here.
Redlands Primary & Nursery School love their website. You can tell by the amount of quality content they regularly upload, and from the level of detail they provide for parents in each of the School jotter-based site’s many sections.
Redlands have found School Jotter easy to use and great for keeping their web visitors up-to-date. In their case study (which you can read here), Website Administrator Patricia White talks about how they use the website to communicate with parents. You can see from sections like the General Information page that Redlands really know their target audience and how they need to be interacting with them: it’s packed with everything you’d need to know, from a list of the school’s facilities, to incentives for 100% attendance records.
The Curriculum section, too, includes downloadable PDFs documents detailing the subjects the school covers, why they cover it and the aims of each subject with regards a child’s development – giving parents a great insight into daily lessons.
Redlands have made great use of the virtual tour, one of School Jotter’s features, to show the school off inside and out. There’s dozens of images of the children’s work in the Gallery section, too. And in the Parents section, they even invite visitors to make suggestions for improvements to the site. We think it’s a lovely to touch on a website that’s all about being open and honest with the parent – and shows how keen the school is to have the best School Jotter website possible.
You can view the Redlands Primary & Nursery School website here.
Your school website is the perfect opportunity to create multimedia activities for children – and Hawes Side Academy’s website, www.hawes-side.org.uk, is a great example of this.
The Blackpool academy’s School Jotter website has everything you’d expect – there’s a calendar of term dates and events, uniform details, all the most recent newsletters uploaded – but Hawes Side have taken it one step further. The Uniform page, for example, has a video hosted by pupils, explaining why they should wear uniform and how it should look.
The School Blog page, too – where teachers have uploaded videos of school activities – is a great example of using the School Jotter template to its full potential. And the Parents And Carers’ blog (within the Parents section) is filled with videos, showing how parents can really get involved with the activities at their child’s school.
But our favourite section of the Hawes Side Academy website has to be the virtual tour, where you can not only tour each area of the school with a multi-view camera – but get a full commentary and guide by the children, too!
Take a look at Hawes Side Academy’s School Jotter website here.
When School Jotter 2 was launched a few months ago, it brought with it a host of new features. For the school website visitor, it also brought with it improved designs – as you can see on this week’s Website Of The Week, Silver Springs Primary Academy, Cheshire.
Silver Springs’ website is a great example of why so many schools are upgrading to School Jotter 2. A bold colour theme brings the school to life the instant you access their website – and School Jotter 2 means it’s optimised for tablet and mobile phone viewing, so people can enjoy Silver Springs on the move, too!
This is possibly one of the easiest school websites we’ve seen to navigate around. Simple menus mean you can find what you need quickly and easily. There’s plenty of content that has been pulled through from the school’s old website too, so you can look back through the archive at photographs and school performance data.
There’s a huge amount of information for parents: including accounts of what the children have been up to by each of the teachers, staff information and advice on healthy eating. And if anyone needs to find Silver Springs, the Contact page includes location information pulled through from Google Maps. Handy!
There are so many other benefits to moving to School Jotter 2, including app bolt-ons and ‘live’ page editing; Silver Springs Primary Academy’s’ website is, to the casual viewer, just the tip of the Jotter 2 iceberg. Take a look at it yourself by clicking here.
Great school websites are the ones that really know what their audience wants. In the case of Burlington Infants School, Bridlington, there are curriculum details and newsletters for parents, links to fun websites for children, and Burlington Infants’ history for those interested in the school.
What we also like about Burlington Infants School’s website is the thought that’s gone into every section: so you have the ‘Our School’ section, which includes their mission statement, the history and comments from parents – a fantastic way to promote themselves. There’s the gallery, which is broken down into albums, like the Autumn 2012 collection of images with a link to the term’s planning too (what the children were learning during the term and events during the term).
But best of all there’s the archive: you can go back and look what’s happened at Burlington Infants School over the last couple of years. Of course, the longer the school has their School Jotter website, the more extensive this section will become!
What’s most apparent about the website though, is that it looks like it has become such an integral part of school life for them. With the colourful design, it makes for an exciting introduction to a friendly school. No pictures of Bridlington seafront though – which we were very disappointed about!
You can view the Burlington Infants School website here.
Finding the time to keep your school website up to date is an issue that frustrates many a head teacher. It’s the reason why School Jotter was created – to allow content to be uploaded quickly and easily, without the need for advanced technical expertise.
Subsequently, it means schools like Welburn Hall School, in North Yorkshire, can populate their school website to the point where it becomes a veritable treasure trove of information for parents, pupils and passive web users alike.
Welburn Hall have used their School Jotter-based website to provide children with useful links (via the ‘Kids Zone’), governors with their own archive of meeting minutes and schedule of forthcoming meetings, and parents with everything they need to know, from an introduction to the staff to information on events and trips.
We particularly like the information they’ve given on the curriculum – complete with photos, and the ‘Our Pupils’ section, which each term features a write-up about a different pupil. It documents what the child likes about the school, what they’ve been doing – even what the pupil’s parents think. It’s a useful element for parents who may be considering sending their child to Welburn. We hope that this, along with the details of the school’s post-16 offerings, and the interesting virtual tour feature, means Welburn Hall School will have plenty of new pupils for a long time to come!
You can take a look at the Welburn Hall School website yourself, by clicking here.
