PhillipDade.com

Whilst studying higher education, I spent a considerable amount of time working at Flegg High School developing what was believed to be, the first dedicated departmental website, Flegg High PE ONLINE.

The website started life back in October 2001, developed by a group of pupils and hosted with Portland Communications.  Portland Communications’ assets have since been taken over by Intrascape, however the original static pages can be viewed here.

The Head of Physical Education at Flegg has always driven the development of the website and in 2004, the website was redeveloped. The new site was designed to be an integral part of PE life within Flegg High School. The students were encouraged to provide ‘Match Reports‘, which were subsequently uploaded for general; viewing along with photo’s of activities as such as the 2004 Poland Trip and a calendar of activities. The site included live updates of the results of the 2004 School Sports Day, available to online visitors within 10 minutes of each individual event being completed.

As time progressed, platforms and infrastructure had developed, as had the users expectations of the website. No longer were the users happy with ‘flat’ pages, they wanted some interaction and to be able to add and gain some value from the resources they were using. So, in late 2004/early 2005, the website underwent another major overhaul, the new site was developed using a database driven (MySQL) back-end with a customised content management system, developed by myself and written in PHP.

As a department, we spent a considerable amount of time, researching requirements and developing a pupil focused personal development application. The application was designed to enable closer interaction between the School and its feeder schools, provide reporting mechanisms and enabling the pupils to monitor their progress and development throughout Key Stage 2, 3 and 4 and compare this anonymously with their peers. The system was designed to streamline current processes and minimise the data duplication and paperwork that was currently in place. Unfortunately, the development of this system stalled due to resourcing issues.

Due to a combination of the complexity of the custom CMS and the decreasing amount of development time I could dedicate to the School; In 2007, I transferred the website over to a Wordpress hosted platform, with a custom template and a new domain name, www.flegghighpe.co.uk. The old content was transferred onto the new platform and the day-to-day content management undertaken ‘in-house’ by a team of ‘Sports Journalists’ - Flegg High pupils who voluntarily gave their time to the websites development.

I still retain a close involvement within the site’s development and we are currently investigating how social media tools can be implemented to improve the engagement of our current and future pupils. Having recently set up a Twitter account for the department, @flegghighpe, the intention is to use this at fixtures to broadcast real-time result information online, as well as during the annual Sports Festival and School Sports Day. I am also investigating an online communications presence on the Social Networking websites and have already implemented Social Bookmarking on the site. The website currently has RSS feeds available and also distributes daily emails of new posts to registered users.

Unfortunately, access restrictions are having an impact on the social media technologies that can be adopted, limiting the benefits and value available. I will continue to blog on the developments of the site and any issues and successes that we come across through the implementation of these technologies.