Web-presence tips for schools

A few takeaways from the session on social media at the Fobisia Leadership Conference 2018:

1. Your school should sit on every social media platform that it can - even if it's not used. For example, just because your school doesn't use Snap-chat at the moment it doesn't mean that it won't in the future. You don't want to find yourself held hostage to someone squatting on usernames you might want in the future. Get on everything, even if you lie dormant. Store the login details somewhere safe.
2. Don't use .pdfs for any part of your website. They are not searchable by Google's spiders and are near-impossible to kill when they go out of date.
3. Pretty much all schools work in multi-lingual environments these days. There are good reasons for not translating everything on your website, but your admissions page should be viewable in every language your customers come at you with. Get it translated.
4. Your enquiries page should be as simple to fill in as falling off a log. People should be able to make an enquiry whilst holding their phone in one hand at a supermarket queue. You only need two pieces of information at the enquiry stage - name and phone number or e-mail. Don't annoy potential customers by asking for anything else - you can fill in the gaps later once you know you've got someone through the door.
5. Check that your website is mobile friendly. Almost all traffic is likely to be generated by people on handheld devices like phones, if your site doesn't look good on a mobile people are going to rapidly lose interest. Get it sorted.
6. No page on your website should have more text than fills 1/3 of the page. Text pages are boring and nobody reads them. Prune, prune, prune.
7. Google your school regularly for the following and if you don't like what you see, fix the problem:
• fees
• job vacancies
• examination results
8. Social media platforms should drive traffic to your website in order to make sure that your website is used. If you post everything on social media and don't link back to your website, no one will look at your website anymore. Here's an example of the sort of post that drives traffic back to the main site:

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CEM data and target grades - do they limit ambition?

There was a very interesting talk at the FOBISIA Leadership Conference over the weekend on the use of CEM data for target setting. The speaker pointed out that the chances graphs generated by CEM show that:

Almost any grade can be obtained from almost any starting point.

Those of us who have to counsel students on their prospects would do well to remind them of this. And it illustrates the extreme caution that needs to be taken in using target grades for students or - as I gather happens in some schools - requiring students to stick their target grades to the front of their books. 

Far better to shoot for the stars, and talk in terms of probability rather than concrete targets or predictions. Anything else really does risk limiting ambition.

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Stereotyping in schools - a useful resource for challenging assumptions

Natasha Devon gave a superb talk at the Fobisia Leadership Conference this weekend. One thing she showed us that really resonated with me - and that could easily be used to foster discussion of gender, sexuality and mental health amongst either staff or pupils - was this ostensibly harmless, tongue-in-cheek advertisement:

Once we had watched it she unpacked for us the assumptions that lie behind such advertising, and how these assumptions pervade the environment around us. In a nutshell, the unspoken assumptions at work here are that:

1. men are sexually attracted to women and vice-versa 
2. happiness - and attendant sexual success - is achieved through buying something (in this case a deodorant)
3. female indulgence in sexual activity is sinful (the angels shatter their halos). Women are either chaste paragons of virtue, or they are harlots. There is no middle ground, as explained by the Madonna-whore complex.
4. female beauty is defined as white, slender and unrealistically proportioned (the producers admitted to the use of Photoshop to enhance the angels' beauty post-production)

Once you realise that almost everything that bombards us throughout the day - TV, social media, radio, printed publications - conforms to a heteronormative ideal it is somewhat like taking the blue pill. 

Scary stuff.

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Two little gems from the Bangkok Google Summit

Having just spent half a day at the Bangkok Google Summit held at the Thai-Chinese School I thought I'd share these two little gems:

Gem #1

I have for years been using the goo.gl link shortener, but I have just found out that it’s due to be deprecated. It gave short links, but they were never particularly memorable.

This is where the gg.gg link shortener comes in. It’s free to use (and if you register, for free, it stores all your links). Best of all though it allows you to customize your links so that they are meaningful to your audience. For example, here’s one I made for the school portal: http://gg.gg/hsportal

There is a Chrome extension to speed the process up. I’m sure there’s also something for IE and for Firefox etc., but I don’t care…!

Gem #2

As I have banged on about many times, it’s generally best to treat documents as canonical and bid farewell forever to the scourge of complicated version control.

There are however, I will concede, a few instances where you want recipients of a file to have their own copy. A good example being in the classroom where you might want each student to have their own editable copy of a document. Google classroom, of course, does this for you. But what if you want to use a similar works flow with colleagues without having to go through the rigmarole of signing them up to a Google Classroom? Well, there’s an easy fix:

1. Open up the file. In this example a Google Doc and copy the url. It will look something like this:

2. Notice the highlighted portion at the end. Change this manually to ‘copy’ as below:

3. Now copy that link onto your clipboard (select the whole thing and press CTRL+C).
4. Compose a new e-mail message and enter text as you wish. Then highlight the text you want your readers to click on in order to get their own copy. Now press CTRL+K (hyperlink) and CTRL+V (paste). Close the hyperlink dialogue box and send the message.
5. When your recipients click on the link they will be asked to make their own copy, as below - hey presto! Useful, but use with caution: in most instances sharing the canonical version is preferable.

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