GH web presence integration discussion
The GH PTA communications team held a meeting this evening to kick-off a discussion of how best we can use technology to improve the communication within our community. Attending the meeting were Scott Ringgold, Martin Saxer, Patrick King, Stacey Pitts and myself (Keith Harrison).
We started our discussion by defining the current major pieces of our web presence which are: this wiki, the Yahoo! group and the main website and defining the role and strengths/weaknesses of each.
Yahoo! group
- Role
- Facilitates direct notification to subscribers (a "push" model of distribution)
- Strengths
- Easy to understand how to use — short learning curve
- Allows any member to share information with all other subscribers
- Great for meeting announcements and relatively time-sensitive information
- Is fairly self-sufficient — doesn't require much administration
- Weaknesses
- Not a great tool for storing or accessing reference infomation — poor search functionality
- It's a "closed" system — it difficult to integrate information from group into other sources (e.g. the calendar)
Wiki
- Role
- Functions as the main storehouse for reference information for the internal community (i.e. current families)
- Strengths
- Anyone is (theoretically) able to add/edit information
- Allows sharing of a diverse array of content (web links, files, photos, calendars etc.)
- Integrated Google Translate functionality may facilitate accessibility for non-English community members
- Weaknesses
- Editing and page creation is too intimidating for many users
- Information will tend to become "stale" over time without diligent oversight
- Look and feel is less than ideal — not very user-friendly or welcoming
Website
- Role
- The external "face" of the school for anyone outside the school community
- Strengths
- Overall design is pretty decent
- Structure (as a "blog") is workable
- Weaknesses
- Content is woefully out of date
- Current content may not be appropriate for the purpose — content should mostly be "evergreen"
That's a decent recap of the current state of things. I'll continue the discussion as to what changes we want to implement in my next post. Please feel free to share your opinions and concerns.
