The best sites are usually the most current. School rules often require time consuming approvals. Clearly, policies need to evolve that meet the needs of our on-line communities as well as the concerns of school administrations. What are your policies? What policies work best to meet the needs of the entire community?

-- Terry Kearns (gradyproject@aol.com), April 29, 2001

Answers

Here is what I do at Morris Knolls. Once a web site if finished by a student - the teacher checks it. I then FTP it to our web site with no link to it yet. I email my supervisor with the link on the email - he clicks on it - looks at it - then approves it or says to make changes. All done by email. Once it's approved I provide the link from the main page.

Good luck - Danny

-- Danny Benz (dbenz@mhrd.k12.nj.us), April 29, 2001.

We have a series of pre-publishing checks that web pages must pass through--a sort of "responsibility sieve." The intent is to distribute the time and effort it takes to check content across several people. We also use two rubrics for evaluating web pages and web sites. Our guidelines and rubrics can be found at http://www.northstar.k12.ak.us/guides/guide.html. It's not perfectly implemented, but it seems to work well in most cases.

-- Skip Via (skip@northstar.k12.ak.us), May 03, 2001.

We allow the responsibility of content approval to lie with our school site webmaster. If a student or teacher wants something published, I look over the webpage for content/grammatical errors, linking, and file naming. If I feel something is questionable, I ask the student or teacher to remove the item and then I will post. Our school system entrusts the local webmaster (typically our technology facilitator) to filter the information posted. All student/faculty webpages are also posted with a disclaimer as to the content being the responsibility of the author and not the school.

-- Michael McKay (mmckay@wchs.carteret.k12.nc.us), May 07, 2001.