[Offtopic] what would an ideal school net provider offer?

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Hi Mike and all,

Here is an email from Mike, at Netspace, a major Australian school 
internet service provider. His integrity in seeking knowledge about
the Internet (his product) and schools is obvious. That thought set me 
thinking .. what would an *ideal* school ISP offer? Any thoughts people?
(now's the time to ask, i think netspace might be listening anyway :-)

At 04:35 PM 10/09/2007, Mike writes:

Folks,

Netspace will be presenting at this year's VITTA conference a session on 
how school's use their web site to best engage with the school community.
I would be keen to hear from schools on how they use their web sites and
extranets to best connect with student families, staff and students.

If you have experiences both good and bad that you would like to share with
others please let me know. I am particularly, but not solely, interested to
see how schools may have used the features contained within the Netspace
Virtual Web Services - the Plesk Application Vault and the 4PSA Application
Vault have many ready to install applications. I would love to hear from
schools that have enabled the shopping cart applet (Zen Cart) to allow for
the payment of school camp fees for example, or who have used Mambo or
Joomla! straight from the vault. Maybe you are using Coppermine to organise
and present school photos. I¹d like to know what you are finding most 
useful in these application vaults.


Perhaps you have your webserver on a machine at school. I would love to 
hear from schools that have successfully implemented an intranet/extranet. 
What hurdles did you overcome and what benefits have you realised?


Maybe you have recently redesigned your website. What were the changes you
put in place and why? Did you commission a dedicated web developer or did
the staff/students/TSSP collaborate and author it? How much student
generated content do you publish?


How many of you publish the school newsletter through your website? I wish
my younger sons' school did: those pesky newsletters just never seem to 
make it home in their schoolbags!


Do you promote local businesses and the wider community through your
website? Do you acknowledge the assistance, financial and otherwise, given
to the school by major sponsors etc?


Do you use your website to fund-raise? If so how?


Do you cross-link websites with the rest of the schools in the cluster? As
an aside, if you do not have your website URL in your SchoolsOnline details
I would highly recommend that you do so. One of the ways that the Google 
web crawlers rate results is looking at the number of times your 
particular URL is referenced on other pages. Having your URL on 
SchoolsOnline should help give you added exposure through the Google 
search engine. In addition I'll be putting together a webpage that will 
list all Netspace school websites.
If you would like to have your school listed then drop me an email with the
schools website URL in it. Or if you have multiple web presences then list
the lot.

If you would like to share your experiences with these points or any others
that you feel applicable then feel free to drop me a line.

all the best,


Mike D'Monte
Business Development Manager - Education
Netspace Online Systems Pty Ltd
Level 1 - 683 Burke Rd,
CAMBERWELL, Victoria 3124
T: 03 9811 0000
D: 03 9811 0081
M: 0410 621 734
F: 1300 138 274
mike.dmonte at staff.netspace.net.au


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Regards all .
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia