Thursday, December 20, 2007

New Website Coming

Portage Township Schools is moving to a new website solution for the district. We hope to have it up and running when school begins after the winter holiday. It is a hosted solution meaning that we will no longer be running the site on our own servers. The reasons for this decision are many including the following: Microsoft is no longer supporting or updating Microsoft Frontpage (our website is created with this product); webmasters throughout the district can only do updates/changes/creations onsite; our current websites are outdated, not as professional looking as most school sites or supplying features that more school sites are providing.

We are moving to a Schoolwires hosted site. We still have full control of our content on all of the sites including individual teacher sites. In fact, because it is hosted, a webmaster can update their sites/pages from literally anyplace in the world where there is an Internet connection. A template is provided for each school site and within that school site, pages can be customized while retaining the basic overall look of the site. Each webmaster (that includes teachers who have a website or want to have a website) has a host of tools at their call: podcasting, databases, blogs (without the fear of students clicking to an inappropriate "next blog"), shared clipart galleries, abilitiy to have forms and surveys running on each site, reports, and broadcast e-mail alerts to parents/subscribers.

We will have training available for all current webmasters in January/February. In the meanwhile we will be moving all sites to the new site and running both until all are completed. Take a look at some of the other local districts' sites who have moved to Schoolwires -- Hobart and Tri-Creek (Lowell).