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A Department Website
| Making the most of your Geography Department Website |
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This GA project is funded by the DfES and began in November 2004
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- To find innovative and practical solutions to the problem of how the make the most of the school Geography Department website, and to share the findings with Geography teachers
- To support the CPD of the participating teachers, their colleagues, and Geography teachers more widely.
- To support the development of the Geography curriculum in a teacher led, or ‘bottom up’ way.
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You may not be familiar with some of the terminology used in these project pages, so here are brief definitions of a few key words:
- Website: The pages and files seen on the computer screen, which provide specific information, such as for a school geography department. A website has a unique address, and it may be accessed on the internet, on an intranet, or on an extranet.
- Internet: The means for supporting website/s which may have unrestricted access. It can be accessed anywhere with a phone line.
- Intranet: The means for supporting a website/s with access restricted to a certain place, such as a school.
- Extranet: The means for supporting a website/s with access restricted to a certain place, such as a school, which allows it to be accessed EXTERNALLY, such as a school geography department website, which can be accessed at home.
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A ‘local solutions’ project (also known as CPD led curriculum development).
This means finding a group of about six to eight pairs of innovative and motivated teachers from six to eight schools. The group then meet away from school (in this case at Oxford University’s School of Geography) and receive input from a range of external experts in related fields, as well as from each other, before planning how they will develop their websites, in an atmosphere of creativity free of the constraints of the school day. The pairs then return to school to carry out their action plan, reviewing, re-planning and taking further action through the year, with the support of the team.
This approach is called action research, and it is essential that each focus is relevant to the participants’ needs in each school. An interim meeting, mid way through the project, supports the reviewing & re-planning stage and a final evaluation meeting focus on the achievements and needs of each school to move forward… action research is an ongoing process. It also produces case studies from which advice and support materials can be shared with the wider teaching world.
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Stuart Cousins & Phil Waud (Horbury School, Wakefield)
Phil Wood & Jo Dexter (Deepings School, Lincolnshire)
Sarah Todd & Melissa Gardner (Stanchester School, Somerset)
Jonathon & David Ayres (Simon Balle School, Herts)
Steve Wilkes & Simon Chandler (King Edwards School, Morpeth)
Vicki Haynes (Royal Docks School, London)
David Mitchell (GA, project coordinator)
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Each participating school developed their intranets and the experience has given them valuable insight into how to make the most of a Geography department website. These are in a variety of contexts, from setting up an intranet from scratch, with very little technical support, to developing an advanced pupil self-assessment tool, for highly personalised and independent learning.
Participant reports can be viewed on the Project Reports page and a spreadsheet summary of the schools' project results is available to download below:
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Support materials are being developed to help you to make the most of YOUR Geography department website and will be available here shortly. In the meantime, the Getting Started page provides some useful tips for planning a site.
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Further support will be available at the GA Conference 2006 in teacher to teacher sessions.
If you have any questions about the project, or would like to find out more, please email David Mitchell (project leader). |
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