AWOL website

In 2005 I created our school website after attending a training course run by our LEA. It wasn't that I was particularly passionate about website building or ICT at that time, in fact I found a lot of it mundane, but I was excited to be learning new skills. I was also very proud of what I achieved. I was a bit obsessive about it and so our website became quite big, quite quickly. I needed to find a way of managing this. The solution was blogging. From 2006, each class had their own blogger blog, thus lots of other staff contributed to the school website. Our website has evolved over the years and we get many compliments from our extended community and prospective employees.

So, imagine my horror at the beginning of the week when I found out that we no longer had our website. It had indeed gone missing without leave. We were not the only schools in this position; 49 other schools had also 'lost' their websites. Whilst I shall refrain from going into any details about what happened, it needs to be said that there has been a lot of anger in Norfolk this week and a few sleepless nights for some teachers.

My headteacher was placing adverts for teaching posts this week and we were in a position that we had not been in for a long time; we could not offer prospective candidates a snapshot of the school. So I felt something needed to be done about this, quickly. Fortunately a lot of our content was stored on blogs, so it was relatively easy to create a google site to host them.

Click here or on the picture above to access the new temporary website

So we have a temporary site, which incidently my digital leaders prefer! As the week has progressed I have thought more and more about my belief in 'fate'. I had been saying for a while that our website needed a facelift, but it was always at the bottom of my 'to do' list. It would have been nice to have been given some notice about the loss of ours, but at least it has jogged me into action. The temporary site will do for now, until something new and whizzy replaces it.

My final thoughts go to all the other schools in Norfolk who have lost their websites, especially those who do not have the time or skills to replace them quickly. I think we have all learned something from this experience, though it may not be a positive learning experience for everyone.