The current Northampton Area School District web site has always been housed in the School World ecosystem. Recently School World was acquired by Blackboard, and they decided that School World sites wouldn't be supported anymore. The result of that decision for Northampton was that our site needed to be migrated over into the blackboard system, which turned out to be a even more of a project than I initially anticipated. Kurt made sure I was provided with full access to the Blackboard sandbox to work with different templates, and learn the background functions of their system. I attended all of the weekly check in sessions with the Blackboard representative, and the administrative training with Blackboard's trainer, Mike. After receiving the trainings, I went through the sandbox site and mocked up a functioning template modeled on our current web site. The intent was for Kurt to have something that he could take to the Superintendent, School Board, and building principals and show certain features that would be present on our new site. In addition to the functional features I also worked to build out the template in school colors, and learned the Blackboard terminology for each aspect of the site in order to redesign it to fit our color scheme.

 

Once all of our content had been aggregated and migrated by the Blackboard staff, I was tasked with going through and basically redoing the work I had done on the sandbox site with our real, inactive site. Kurt asked me to mock up the district site, each of the school sites, and the intranet page in a different template so that he could show them off to the Superintendent for approval. The best of those are tiled in the picture to the right. I chose the one that I thought was the cleanest looking, most functional, with the fewest bugs to be the template used for the district site, and did my best with the rest. Blackboard site templates are extremely buggy. For example, our district tag line is, "Learn, Listen, and Lead," and we want that displayed prominently on every site. When I changed the "and" to a more design friendly "&" in some cases all of the content from the entire site would disappear, but would return when I changed it back. They were just a series of little frustrations that made the task more interesting, and a bit longer. In the end the Superintendent agreed with me and chose the template I liked best, shown below.

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My work with the web site was not done with the pages being finished. I am a part of the training team, and will be working closely with Kurt and the technology staff to train all of the people throughout the district who will be updating the various web sites. I began this process by going back through all of the training materials we had received from our sessions with Mike, and pouring over the help materials Blackboard provides. From that I created a training plan that outlines each position from "Site Administrators," "Channel Directors," "Section Editors, and "Page Editors", and all of the responsibilities they would need to be trained for. That document is being used as the basis to determine what will be covered in the training sessions run by the technology department. Kurt also asked me to train the Athletic Department staff to run their channel on the site, since I have worked more closely with them in the past than he has. The training portion of the work has only just begun, but I'm looking forward to seeing my contributions to our new website go live at the beginning of 2018.