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Which bring me to the point of this post, which is to basically complain about the utter stupidity of people in a beaurocratic system. If you're looking for a question or a problem to crop up in this post, you might as well stop reading now. This is pure rant.
About three months ago the other teachers on my grade level and I decided that we were tired of making phone calls or writing frantic notes at the end of the day to answer the same questions over and over for the parents of our students. So we set about getting together information about the school, the people in it, etc., planning to build a small web site as a resource specifically for the parents of our students (online homework sheets, the lunch menu, nothing fancy, plus a teacher's side with links, lesson plans, etc). I designed the page and programmed the site using NOTHING fancy. Seriously, it was pure HTML and CSS. No Javascript, no PHP. I thought, "What problem could they possibly have with a dozen simple, valid, html files and a stylesheet?"
Turns out, a lot. The downtown web lackeys FREAKED OUT when I emailed them to find out whether they would host the site on the school server or if we should just plan to have it hosted apart from the school system's site. I recieved a slew of threatening emails stating that I would be fired if I attempted to post school information on a non-school system server (this is almost certainly a lie). The emails included comments like:
There are complex technologies at work on the web that a classroom teacher would not understand. Your "innocent" page code could crash the [school system] servers and take all of our information offline. Better to leave this to the experts.
(Yes. HTML is about as complex as it gets. Perhaps you're referring to that complicated bit at the beginning called a DOCTYPE? You wouldn't recognize it, of course, since none of your pages has one.)
...and...
In order to design your own page for our system you would have to comply with Section 508 guidelines. Do you even know what those are?
(Do you? I've been building sites that comply with them for over a year. Yet 50% of your "school system" pages do not comply with those standards at all, so what's up with THAT?)
Ha! They further informed me that the school system web-team had developed a system that included web page templates, blah blah blah for teachers to use to create pages for their schools, and said I would be better off just using one of those. Well, I checked out "one of those" and it turns out they are about as well-built as the Titanic was unsinkable. Some choice nuggets included:
1. No doctype.
2. Tables-based design (that is clearly unnecessary and unjustified).
3. align and bgcolor and font tags, Oh My!
4. Javascript rollovers
5. No alt attributes (508, what?)
Not to mention it's about as appealing as a dog biscuit is tasty. Bear in mind this is NOT a school page designed by a fifth grader, but a web design template created by some web-lackey who, if the school system reports are true, gets paid almost half again of my yearly salary.
What was my point? Oh, yeah...this beaurocratic stuff bites.
Here's another little chunk of idiocy: in order to update a site on their server, we have to send it to them ON A FLOPPY DISK. Ha! Ha! Ha! A what? What the hell is a floppy disk? "Hello, Web Department? 1990 called; they want their technology back." And to think I was going to punch holes in an index card and send it over via Pony Express.
Not only is that outdated, but it also means that updating your information can take upwards of two weeks! I might as well just walk to everyone's house and tell them the information in person for all the good that will do.
So, regardless, what could have been a very well-developed, user-friendly, valuable resource to the parents of students at my school (and beyond, as we had planned a series of parent-geared articles about how to help students having problems in certain academic areas) died in the water because of the close-minded, rule-shackled web design team who, it so happens, isn't even designing the school system's web presence in the right way.
Any way to anonymously send these people a WebmasterWorld membership?
Thanks for listening.
cEM
PS: Just in case, let me express my understanding that MOST people who work for the school system do not have the web experience that I do. Nor should they. So the web team's assumptions that I was clueless might hav ebeen justified, except that I made it clear in my original email that I was experienced and knowlegable of things-webby, and not by throwing it in their face that I am a freelance designer, but by talking about the technology and procedures involved in creating and maintaining a web site in an intelligible and informed manner. Nonetheless, they assumed I was a rube.
[edited by: trillianjedi at 3:02 pm (utc) on April 14, 2005]
Or go for the job yourself...
Akk! And lose my summers off, my Spring Break, my two weeks at Christmas? Spend the day dealing with adults instead of 5 year olds? No thanks. I'll stay in my classroom with my 25 nice kids who rush to help when their friends drop a pencil and regularly hug each other for no apparent reason. But if any informed WebmasterWorld member is interested, I'd happily endorse you for the job. ;)
How would you have reacted if one of those guys had come up with a fully worked out plan how to better teach the kids at your school.
This notion was mentioned earlier, and it is a good point. I've had parents try to tell me how to approach things in my class before and I certainly don't react well to it (although in such a case, I'm at least expected to respond in a cordial manner). I'm not so sure it's an accurate comparison, though. A better comparison might be "How would you react if one of these IT guys came to you with ideas on a different way for them to help their first grader with his homework." See, I wasn't really asking them to DO anything; wasn't telling them how to do their job. It turns out their system requires them to do something, but there is no literature (except the half dozen emails now on my hard drive) that explains that procedure to those of us out in the system.
While I can see the merits in your suggested approach (smile big, acknowledge expertise and lay the burden on their laps), it still leaves me facing the fact that updating the site through them will take weeks to accomplish. While this would be fine for some of the information, the most important bits will need to be updated once or twice a week. If their system doesn't allow me to upload my own information, I'm afraid the site-as-is won't function.
I cannot express enough how idiotic I find this system to be. The web team is in no position to determine the appropriateness of content placed on a school website (that's up to the building principal). The only reason I can think for them to deny us upload rights is the fear that we would upload corrupted files, but of course a site license for a program like MM Contribute or some other CMS (these people could certainly build a custom one if they chose) would solve that by allowing us only to alter the text of a given page.
I simply cannot fathom why the school system would want to actually discourage communication via modern technology, especially since one of our duties is to teach our students how to use such technology to communicate themselves. But now I'm off ranting again.
One thing that has occured to me through all of this (especially as a result of the discussion in this thread), is that the IT guys probably don't even KNOW how unuseable their system is for us teachers. They have probably never gotten a lot of saavy feedback, because very few teachers are web/technology saavy enough to do the feeding. So I'm thinking at the very least a non-aggresive letter making some requested alterations may be in order. Perhaps I can have a colleague send it in so they don't know it's from me. ;)
Is there anything that prevents you from sending a newsletter?
cEM
My old school is private (not because I grew up a rich snob, but because I got kicked out of public school) - A few years back, I went and looked at their site and it was a train wreck. They even had pop-ups on most pages (not advertising, just "super-duper-extra-useful" tidbits of information and philosophical quotes and other such crap). Links to PDF files without warning, which contained information that had no business being PDFed. The whole site worked great in IE but fell apart miserably in every other browser, brutally graphics heavy the whole way through, so unless you had broadband the site was virtually unusable...
And on and on and on.
I sent them a friendly e-mail pointing out that some of the things they were doing didn't follow current design techniques.
I got 5 angry, actually downright belligerant e-mails back farom vrious people in administration.
I got one e-mail back from the fellow who was doing the site (who was an old teacher I knew), who's letter basically said he knew there were problems, but he had to work within the "Administrative Guidelines" of the organisation. Translation: the mucky mucks who didn't know a damn thing about the web gave him the screws until he came out with the horrid site I was looking at.
That might be the situation you're up against as well. The cogs in the IT department might know perfectly well the train wreck that is their website, but the administrators above them have paperworked them into a corner.
This isn't really about the IT chicken-littles. This is about the PARENTS. You need to pitch this to the PTA and let them raise the holy heck that is needed to get this online. I just went through this EXACT same scenario with my son's school last year.
It started with this oft-repeated dialouge with my son:
"Son, what do you have for homework tonight?"
"We didn't have any homework, Dad."
To be followed by a report card with the following comments from each of his teachers:
Does not complete assigned homework.
So I joined the PTA, discussed it with the teachers, and told them I would (FOR FREE!) design and host a resource site where parents could download daily assignments, lunch menus, school activities, live chat with teachers... you name it. I even offered to help install live webcams for parents to watch during the day.
The teachers absolutely loved me. The pricipal loved me, my son hated me, however...The IT guys went freakin' BBBEEEZZZEEERRRKKK! Raised the same objections that you mentioned. Started talking about 1st ammendment lawsuits and scared the daylights out of everyone.
So at the next school Christmas Concert, in front of 1,500 parents, I told them what I was proposing. Three weeks later the system was in place, and my son still hates me.
Take your idea to the parents. Believe me, the IT guys and gals are paid by the parents. They will do what the parents want, if the parents, teachers, and administrators want it. Good luck to you!
