ChrisRyall

This will be become a very common theme: what I have done to improve our school website, www.gcus.net

After upgrading the software a few days ago today it was the turn of the theme to be renewed. Lots of small changes took place, including:

• Changing font sizes, using wonderfully relative ems – particularly for headings of articles, content on the front page and in some blocks on the sides.
• Changing the titles, positions and contents of the side blocks, particular to improve their consistency throughout the site.
• Adding new icons to the central section of the first page, the icons were found via the wonderful Vista Icons site.
• Tidying my css (the code which controls the appearance of the elements on the web pages) in preparation form more improvements.
• Abbreviating some headlines and removing the shouty all capital letter parts to improve layout and readability.
• And of course, added some colour!
  

Now the colour part is of course the most contentious part, and everyone has an opinion on it!

Myself and Mrs Ryall (my most reliable and helpful critic) felt that the text was disappearing a bit too much into the white background and the whole site had a too washed out feel (very Google 1995-6 I know!). Some people love the colour, some people don’t. Some people have preferred or hated a different shade, some people would prefer it white…

I even experimented with spots in the background, and it looked worse! Don’t worry soon you’ll be able to vote and leave your comments about the colour on the website itself.

Things to do: add a poll to the site and possibly allow people to choose their own theme!
Along with the cosmetic changes I also started to reorder some menus and move some content around to match this brief and very rough plan for the content of the site.

Like any business sector education suffers from its fair share of acronyms. The ones above refer to:

• SIMS – Schools Information Management System, is a product from Capita which we use to manage our student data.
• SEN - Special Educational Needs
• IEP - Individual Education Plan, but now we’re looking at ILPs, Individual Learning Plans

Part of my job is to develop our use of SIMS. Today I spent some time with the staff responsible for our students with particular learning needs, adn we came up with the following ideas.

• How can we use SIMS to better communicate and manage students IEPs and specific targets resulting from review meetings?
• Can we improve our collection of information from staff relating to students with particular learing needs?
• How can we extend our best practice of IEPs to ILPS for every stduent?

Naturally, our use of ICT has some input into these questions, so as a result:

• Our network administrator has activated the alerts and messaging feature within SIMs for me to trial with some staff – this now leaves me with a training job to fulfil.
• I have a copy of IEP Writer, an additional module for SIMs, to explore and evaluate with a view to using it as part of our academic review process and to build and use ILPs with each student.
• I need to prepare some training for our Learning Support Assistants and some administrative assistants in the use of the SEN module in SIMs.

As I mentioned yesterday, every small step or discussion seems to lead to two or three more actions! Although the job doesn’t have a name, it isn’t hard to find things to do
Luckily one of our assistant head teachers has booked some SIMs training for next week which should help me along.

Don’t you love it when you have a question or an idea, Google it and find that someone has already had the idea, developed it and produced a great solution. As you’ve probably spotted I have my collection of photos on Flickr, and have also become trapped in the Facebook world. How do I easily share my Flickr photos in Facebok? How to avoid the idiocy of having to upload my images  to both  sites?

Easy. Keebler has built this Flickr2Facebook bookmarklet. Enjoy. Thank you Keebler, very much.

Wow, I can now order pizza from the best pizza restaurant in Sudbury using their website www.pizzatown.co.uk – you even get a 15% discount. The best thing since pizza.

Of course the Feisty Fawn is fantasic, as expected. Thanks go to lots of people, but I now have wireless up and running in Ubuntu on my work laptop, thanks to:

• Sandra, for the partioning – with hopelessly many errors on the disk GParted was very sad, but ParitionMagic did the stuff, damn you Symantec!
• Linus & Mark (& everyone!) for the OS
• The Xubuntu team & supporters
• Everyone at XFCE for the desktop – brilliant, perfect & gorgeous!
• Jukka & everyone who contributes at Launchpad and Ubuntuforums – this was the answer to the Broadcom 4309 wireless chipset problem, Jukka had the exact advice I needed!
• Louise for cups of tea & the time to play.