Web Site Documentation

Last year, Deddington Primary School put out an appeal requesting volunteers who would be prepared to update its website and help keep it maintained thereafter.  A parent suggested asking the children to take responsibility for the site content, and the Deddington Web Club was launched shortly afterwards in the Autumn term 2006.  A small group of Year 6 children agreed to give up their lunchtime once a week and happily replaced 3 year old items with more timely and relevant information.  However, by Christmas the group were feeling restricted by the limited scope of their duties; they wanted to make sweeping changes to the entire structure and overall look and feel of the website.

At around the same time, Schools IK (software developers who host websites for schools) announced a new version of its web template tools and the Press Release suggested to the children that they would have much more flexibility and opportunity to design a professional and fun website.  The Web Club unanimously decided to invest most of its efforts into building a brand new site from scratch, and thereafter devoted just a small amount of time to keeping the original site current.  Using the IK software has been fantastic; the templates are all incredibly user friendly and shield the contributors from complicated HTML.  However, the children have all learnt how to load images, create pages of text with visual impact, write resourcefully and create hyperlinks to content both within their website and to external sources.

The children have made all the decisions regarding colours, templates, hierarchy and content.  Apart from the Policies (which have been cut and pasted from School documents), Newsletters and downloadable PDF school brochures, everything has been written directly by the children or as a result of brief interviews with teachers.  The group were very aware that they were building the site for 3 different groups of people; themselves as a community, prospective parents and prospective pupils and have tried to cater for all segments equally.  No one child took on a particular role; they have worked both individually (see Reviews and Quizzes) and in pairs, and that they gathered all the necessary information in such a very short space of time is a fantastic achievement.  In addition, each child has had responsibility for proof reading others’ work and checking spelling, punctuation, grammar, repetition and consistency.  Immediately prior to going live, the children tested the site with their parents to check that links and search facilities were working correctly.

The Web Club site became the live Deddington School website at the end of April 2007 and from now until the end of term, Y6 responsibility will be to maintain and update only.  It is hoped that a group of volunteers from the current Y5 will take over as caretakers of the site next year; who knows what could happen!

The original 8 members of the Deddington Web Club are:

Annabel Burkill

Louise Davies

Charlotte Fleming

Grace Phethean

James Taylor

Oliver Tindale

Jamie Turner

Jake Ward

They were ably assisted later in the year by;

Bronwen Cooke

and finally;

Joseph Munson