Black Light Tips – Black light (I need to learn more about UV light and glaucoma before touching this). Strobing blacklight – FrightShop.com: 27” Blacklight Strobe

What makes a great school website? You can look at a lot of the award winners and I think you can start to draw some conclusions. #1 is student involvement. Students have the energy, the breadths of interests, the technical savvy to really contribute. #2 is currency. The great websites have all kinds of current articles and are updated frequently.

Most of these websites are public schools and are oriented towards current students. I think for a private school we need to serve better the prospective student base, the parent base, and the donor base. As many college sites do.

There are probably some good task-based metrics we could come up with. For each user segment, how easy is it for them to get to the 5 most important items/perform the 5 most important tasks.

Visual Thesaurus. Totally gratuitous but fun – visual thesaurus.

Weblogs in Education. There is a great blog about blogs and schools – Weblogg-ed Vol.2: Using Weblogs in Education. I am going to develop the argument here that all school websites should be blogs, this is a great source of fodder.

Best School Websites. Forest Ridge recently posted a new version of their website, which is good, and I want to help them make it even better. I am starting to canvas the web for great school websites. The NSPA denotes these as the best. And some others from the OJR.

School Web Site Principles. I’ve thought about a little more and am starting to develop some requirements and design principles wrt school websites.

My current take on principles:

• Student involvement. Students should do the bulk of the work for developing and maintaining the site. They have the energy. They have the knowhow. It is a great learning experience. It doesn’t require a huge budget.
• Content management. At the base of the school website should be a great content management system. We want every member of the school community to be able to easily post content in the most natural way for them. Standard documents, email – they should all be able to be easily posted to the system, without having to edit the website to take the content in. (A multiuser blog architecture would work nicely).
• Every publication created at the school should be created with the web as the primary publication target. Syllabi, meeting agendas, newsletters – let’s get it all on the web. We want the website to be lively and constantly updated, let’s get everything up there.
• Let’s leverage the effort of others and use standard software packages to build the website. No one should be building new website scripts and content management systems – let’s leverage what exists and what is economically viable – blog technology again is a good start as it is very economical.
• Collaborate with other schools. Every school needs the same technology for their website. It is not a source of competitive advantage. Let’s collaborate with other area schools or schools nationwide on the technology and ideas.
• Clean separation of content, layout, and code. As articulated above we need to cleanly separate out content – we want every member of the school community regardless of their technology orientation to be able to get their content posted on the web. We don’t need to turn everyone into webmasters or PHP coders. We also want to separate out cleanly layout from code. So that the members of the school community who care about design and have design skills can work on site design, while the members who care about coding and architecture can work on coding and architecture. Pretty obvious web design principles but not something that most schools practice as far as I can see.

Seattle School Blogs. Here is another seattle area person thinking about school blogs – School Blog or Not – we have to get together.

Education Blogs Webring. For more reading – NetRing: Edublog WebRing

Movie Maker 2 Beta. Need to try this out this weekend. Windows Movie Maker 2 Beta Download

Outdoor club. Looks like a way fun outing. This is why we live in the Pacific NW. Thanks Mr. Bean.

NAIS. Lots of good stats about private school trends up here – National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

Megaconverter 2. Per Adrian, a super useful site – MegaConverter 2 # 11

VCs and Disclosure. No vc in the world should object to greater disclosure and accountability – hold us to the same standards that everyone else is held to. Battle over disclosure - Venture Capital Journal:

VC firms vow that they will take countermeasures against public pension funds that disclose sensitive information about private equity performance – such as excluding them from upcoming funds. Notes one VC: ‘It’s unbelievable how stupid they are-they’re winning the battle but losing the war. If I had to choose between two investors [one of which required greater disclosure than the other], I would go with the people that don’t have disclosure requirements.’ Thus far, UTIMCO and CalPERS are the two largest institutional investors that have pledged greater transparency on private equity performance. VC industry insiders now worry that other institutional investors may follow their example.

Sonics. Went to my first Sonics game last night. The Sonics look fun this year – youthful, high energy, dangerous at every position. The Jazz meanwhile managed to look both old (Stockton, Malone) and green (the rest of the team).