Making School Web Pages More User-Friendly

by John Kuzmich, Jr.

September, 2001 Issue of the SBO magazine

School Web pages are becoming the norm in education today, and music teachers are rapidly experiencing the benefits of this mass communication. Schools and teachers can communicate rapidly and widely to people in and beyond their own communities like never before. During the past several months, School Band and Orchestra’s “Casting A Web Presence” column has featured selected music Web pages that display new ways to promote music programs. In this installment of the Technology column, I will share some software applications that can create quick communication enhancements on your school Web page with easy HTML user-friendliness.

Most Web development requires HTML programming skills, and even when automated, Web development packages are used. Upon examination of text editors, you will find that automated Web development packages add extraneous HTML codes that inhibit Web pages from running as smoothly as they should. The programs reviewed in this article offer unique software applications that contain valuable information for music education Web pages without in-depth HTML programming know-how. Graphically enhanced fundraising information or a school calendar can offer eye-catching information rather than mere word processing text.

Parents and students can view electronic grade books. Home music practice results by students can be e-mailed quickly and with easy access with no music practice cards to lose. Create and post newsletters about your music program without concerns about HTML programming skills. And all of these features can report information to your parents and students and administrations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year via your school Web page. So relax and learn how selected software applications can enhance your school Web page.

Fundraising

The ability to post data is very valuable to music educators on school Web pages. It is becoming an important factor in fundraising strategies. FileMaker Pro by FileMaker (www.filemaker.com) makes it very easy to publish data on the Web. This software has a built-in feature that automatically creates the Web pages and makes them available to the world via its own Web server. This single-click Web creation is automatically published onto your intranet/Internet. The FileMaker Pro 5.5 Instant Web Publishing Table View now supports buttons in headers and footers, sorting by clicking column headers, and uniform row heights despite differences in container and text field sizes. Advanced users can easily create complex solutions that rival the likes of Amazon.com et al. In the Denton, Texas, Independent school district, Webmaster Jeff Windsor and his fellow music teachers use FileMaker Pro for everything from Web surveys and work-order tracking to online tests and quizzes. The results are all stored in a database for later use. Denton High School music teachers regularly post extensive fundraising information on their Web pages. Unfortunately, you can’t view the data for security purposes, but every student and parent can view the Web site with a special pin number. I viewed the actual Web URLs for their fundraising records created with FileMaker Pro, and here’s an example of the type of information for each student contained in their fundraising Web pages.

Date:

Reference:

Type:

Description:

Credit:

Debit:

Balance:

Calendars

A nice, graphic music calendar is very helpful on a Web site. Performances and meetings are clearly communicated and can be printed out by parents, students or other teachers. I use Creative Calendar Plus because it serves two purposes for me. It can create sophisticated, flexibly designed calendars with more than 40 different views with printing and duplicating capabilities, and it can post the same calendars with or without graphics on the Web site. All you have to do is create the calendar and then save it in HTML file format with one click! To better understand how simple it is to post an HTML-coded calendar, please go to my school Web site at http://204.98.1.2/middle/carmody/

computers/calendar.html to see 10 months of calendars. Go to “edit” in your browser and click on “Page Source” and you will see the simple HTML coding for this calendar posting.

Another product I can recommend is CalendarServer.com (www.calendar server.com). This Web-based program makes simple and beautiful monthly calendar Web pages for free. This company also gives you free Web pages on its Web site to post your calendars so you don’t have to use storage space on your school’s Web page. My own monthly calendars’ posted HTML file format can take up to 900 KB without any graphics, and 12-month calendars could easily take eight or nine MB of Web server storage space.

X-Cal-Multi from CalendarServe (www.calendarserve.com) is a plug-in for WebStar servers. The calendar offered by this product has sophisticated features that can handle an entire school district or any number of schools. The size of the HTML files is surprisingly small. The most complex files for the Denton Independent School District take up only 164KB for the database and 54KB for the graphics (www.dentonisd.org).

Maintaining event schedule information in HTML form can be tedious and error prone, not to mention the repetitive work involved in redoing the HTML month after month if you opt for an easy-to-read monthly calendar view. A calendar software application that can free you up from the low level HTML coding, by providing an easy to use point-and-click user interface to input and update your calendar, is very desirable.

Music Practice

We all agree that practice can be important for students’ progress and musical growth, but keeping track of music practice cards can be a tedious task. Molto Music has come up with an ingenious and inexpensive Musician’s Practice Planner and now the software version of the popular planner is available online. The software is designed for band, orchestra, choir and private lessons.

With Musician’s Practice Planner, students have the opportunity to track their practice sessions and more efficiently meet their practice goals. When students are required to practice for a grade, this record offers teachers one more way to assess students’ progress.

The software allows teachers to view a student’s practice record for the week, month, quarter or semester. There is also the option of viewing all students’ practice records for the current week – while avoiding the hassle of dealing with more paper! The software is licensed to a school or school district for one year and is downloaded directly from the Molto Music Web site (www.moltomusicbooks.com). Each teacher using the software is issued a password to access his or her reports. Students are also issued passwords so they can post their practice logs to their teacher.

Newsletters

Ever wish you could maintain an ongoing newsletter or a column for music department activities, alumni news, etc.? Students or parents are more likely to volunteer to do the reporting and writing if their work receives broader recognition. That just got easier. Once you have edited the final copy for posting to the Internet, the actual posting can be a pleasant experience. If you combine FileMaker Pro with Lasso (www.blueworld.com), this Web-based content management system allows teachers to maintain their Web pages using only a browser. You can see how one school district used this system at www.dentonisd.org/ technology/teacherpages.htm. This URL lives up to its title, EZ-UPDATE SYSTEM, which allows teachers to easily create class Web pages without having to learn HTML coding. The process for creating a “generic” page is simple. This can be done from any Web-connected computer with a browser. The results must be good since more than 288 classroom teachers out of the district’s 1600 teachers have already used this system in the last 12 months. Another good online tutorial can be found at www.pagetutor. com/pagetutor/makapage. Product features of Lasso Professional 5 can be found at www.blueworld.com/Lasso5/ LassoPro.

Electronic Grade Books

Electronic grade books are making grading easier and more professional. Be cautious in your purchase of an electronic grade book because there are some significant new changes. There are at least three features that need to be included to make it compatible with current school Web posting.

• It must be able to post grade files to a school Web site.

• It must be able to send grades to the school district’s administration system for grading and attendance. In my district this administration system is called SASI.

• It must be able to produce individual progress reports online with full password security protection.

There are two ways to post grades on the Internet. You can use a server-based or server-dependent software application such as the Pinnacle System (www.gradebook.com), called Gradebook2, by Excelsior, or you can use a non-server-based product like Making The Grade or Grade Busters (www. gradebusters.com), by Jay Klein Productions, that fully supports HTML and Web posting of students’ academic and behavior information without the need of a school site license. There are advantages and limitations for each of these two software applications. I will first summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the Pinnacle system server-based program.

The advantages of the Pinnacle system are that the grades are immediately available on the Internet as soon as the teacher enters the grade and saves the file. Students do not have to ask teachers to see their grades and parents do not have to call teachers to check their child’s grades. Students can also check their grades for accuracy in case of a teacher entry error. Special individuals (counselors, coaches, etc.) can be given access to the grades. Teachers are more likely to keep their grades up to date because of increased expectations. Overall education is also improved and there is less stress at the end of a grading period, when most teachers are caught up with their grades. Parents can proactively use the Internet to assess all of their child’s classes’ ongoing progress and know what to expect for the final grade. Pinnacle System also provides for those parents without Internet access. They can get the same information by phone.

The advantages of the non-server system for the Jay Klein products are that each and every teacher has a choice when their grades are posted and individual teachers can post their own grades without the school having a site license and/or a network system. As any teacher knows, the grade book and attendance record is “a work in progress.” Until the end of a marking period (and sometimes not even then), it lies in a state of constant change and repair. Some educators believe that public postings of that information should be at the teacher’s discretion and time schedule and not that of an IT specialist laboring far from the classroom. It is all too common for a teacher to withhold relevant information from his or her electronic grade book until it is completely ready and “sanitized” for posting.

Both Excelsior and Jay Klein Production products offer full features for grades, discipline, attendance, seating charts with student photography and performance standards plus a variety of report/progress report options. Note: Making The Grade in version 10, to be released this fall, will offer a single click to automatically and transparently transfer HTML documents of the teacher’s choice to the school Web site.

Automatic Accompaniment Generators

Ever want your students practicing improvisation at home? Try posting some of your Band-In-A-Box scores for online practice applications. This is particularly good with jazz chord changes. With this program, you can create MIDI files of a rhythm section playing the chord changes from a tune your band may be working on. The newly created file can be easily posted onto a Web site so that students can see the notes and chords for the jazz changes. This whole process is quite simple to perform and very valuable to the students in the Fulton Junior High Band program in Indianapolis, Ind. Their new Web site will be operational by fall at www.wayne. k12.in.us.

You can also post Band-In-A-Box files with a student soloist since version nine and above can record acoustic instruments into the software application and then post the accompaniment and soloist as an MP3 file. For an example, check me out playing the blues at www.kuzmich.com/kuzdir.html. You can feature a different student each month online, jamming with Band-In-A-Box, and post it to the school Web page. Here is an example of what I did at the Brigham Young University Jazz Festival recording student soloists, burning a CD and posting the recording on the Web to give them a souvenir: www.kuzmich. com/BYUrecording_2001.html.

Audio and Video Clips/Streaming

This is a huge topic and well deserving of another article. For fast information, go to my article in the December, 2000, issue of this column titled: “Creative Aspects of Video Streaming.”

An online version is available at www. sbomagazine.com/arch/dec00/technology. htm. This article focuses on RealProducer (www.real.com), which is a very thorough product but a bit more complicated than QuickTime (www. apple.com/ quicktime) from Apple. Apple’s iMovie software makes it a snap to publish digital video on the Web. Both formats can be viewed by free browser plug-ins.

For good audio and video Web presentations, you should check out the Wooster High School, Wooster, Ohio, Web site at www.whsmusic.nvi. net/ media.htm. One of the most successful video streaming public school music Web sites is New Trier High School, Winnetka, Ill., at www.ntjazz.com. They even do their concerts “live” on the Web in addition to offering video streaming of their concerts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Musical Scores

Too rarely do music educators teach arranging/composition techniques and yet it is part of the MENC National Teaching Standards for creating music. Fulton Junior High School’s Band program is presently working on the format of their school Web page for online student portfolios. They plan to put together a portfolio presented for their student/parent conferences in October, 2001. They will post the compositions/arrangements on their school Web site. There are three particularly good notation programs that can easily create data files that you can post on the Web: Finale 2001 by Coda Music (www.codamusic.com), Sibelius by Sibelius (www.sibelius.com), and Igor Engraver by Note Heads Music (www.noteheads.com).

You will find these programs great to work with and very powerful. Since notation software applications cost more than most music software programs, each of these programs has a substantial discounted price for music educators. Take advantage of this and explore a new world of music creativity.

The Bullock Creek band program of Midland, Michigan downloads individual parts to their school fight song at www.bcbands.org via scanned data files in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. While at this Web site, check out their “Virtual Bandroom” with QuickTime. Just drag the mouse to the right or left, up or down, and you can view the middle and high school band rooms in real-time.

See You On the Web!

Web enhancement products with low level HTML requirements are rapidly expanding the capabilities of school Web sites. The variety of software applications reviewed in this article can and certainly will help make them both very attractive and more functional for repeated visits, which is the goal of all Web sites. In the Denton Independent School District, individual music teachers update their school’s Web site themselves. Special thanks to Jeff Windsor of the Denton Independent School District in Denton, Texas, and David Cole at Fulton Middle School in Indianapolis, Ind., for their willingness to brainstorm with me about the Web enhancement software applications that have been so successful on their school Web pages. For more information about other software applications with HTML tricks not covered in this installment, such as online slideshows by Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Corel’s Presentations, please go to my June, 2000, column at www.sbomagazine.com/arch/june2000/ technology.htm.