Open wide please.......

It has been an interesting week. The intermediate schools are having parent meetings and are using the Tamaki College links to the teacher Google sites that used to be on the Manaiakalani website to show parents what students do when they come up to the college in year 9. This was showing a load of buttons to individual teacher sites and not all of them were available for anyone outside of the school domain to view. We were asked to open everything up so anyone can have a look.
The first job was to get staff to send in the links for the sites that they are using with students this year. I did this via a Google form in an email as it collates everything into a handy dandy spreadsheet.
The next bit came from management to tell all staff to open their sites to the world.
This has been met by a very mixed reaction and a lot of worried conversations. I had given up worrying about this a while a go as my site has been open since the start, so I had forgotten the issues that come up about this. The main one has been staff worried about copyright issues. I have been encouraging :-

• use of a bibliography
• links back to the original information sources
• a disclaimer

I have also been using smiles and hugs where needed!!!

I then redesigned the page for the links. I did this by creating a site especially for the job, with buttons for each department / area. These buttons link to a page where I am putting the site links as they come through from staff in the form of a table. The html code for this page could then be inserted on the Manaiakalani site ( handy, as I am REALLY fussy about the layout of buttons, and the html code takes all that with it ). This site is HERE.

On someones else's site, you can only specify what goes on the actual page area, so we sent along the site topper to decorate too!!.....