Carleton Green Primary School in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire have entirely overhauled their website with the collaboration of Blackpool-based company Schudio. This major redesign saw the addition of a modern logo, professional photos and well-presented content that is clear and accessible, both on computers and mobile devices.

Your website has become the first port of call for everyone interested in engaging with with your school. It is true of parents who will be looking for information that reassures them that yours is the school for their son or daughter. Your website is your best marketing tool to this audience.

My first use of the Plickers assessment app for SEN purposes was met with mixed results. Staff and students were intrigued, but too much support was required for the students to use the cards that are provided on the website in a meaningful way. The concept of holding the card up a certain way to ensure a letter was the right way round was not clear to most. The abstraction between an answer they knew and the letter depicted on the card is a concept that presents difficulties for most of my students.

Office supply company Frillo has today launched a new online marketplace specifically designed for schools, academies and other public sector organisations. The Hull-based organisation’s Education Store, which is linked to Frillo’s online store for private sector businesses, provides public sector procurement specialists with a second-to-none choice of EU compliant products. This range includes IT equipment such as iPad and laptops as well as books and stationary supplies. All with no mark-up, meaning greater value for money.

Schools are all under a significant obligation to provide certain information on their school websites these days. This is a bit of a problem for lots of schools in itself. The reality is that schools have to compete more and more on every level and having a website that is fresh, modern and regularly updated is key to your success.

Given that much of the British education system is currently enjoying the Easter Holidays, it’s important for a school’s website to show information such as contact details, facilities and, of course, term dates. As Ian Richardson of Schudio points out, a school’s website needs to be managed properly; here are some of his finest tips.

I meet with schools all over the country regularly, and one of the recurring themes is the struggle for schools to effectively keep their websites up to date. Of course I’ll say that having a system that is easy to use helps enormously, but whatever system you have in place, or whichever method you use to keep your website up-to-date, by following a few steps that are quite straightforward you can have a website for your school that is engaging and keeps users coming back time and time again.

Thanks to compelling astronomy experts such as Professor Brian Cox, Sir Patrick Moore and Carl Sagan, study of the stars has often been a fascinating, entertaining practise. But how to best teach this subject in schools, and how do you make the most of such an interesting topic? Rachel Wintemberg, Marc Taras and Lindsey Tisch, teachers at William C. McGinnis School in Perth Amboy, New Jersey have been teaching astronomy using tools as diverse as iPads and toilet paper...

This is an interdisciplinary science, maths, art and technology lesson by Marc Taras, Lindsey Tisch and Rachel Wintemberg at William C. McGinnis School, Perth Amboy NJ. We used the following iPad apps and websites to investigate the solar system:

http://vitotechnology.com/solar-walk.html

http://vitotechnology.com/star-walk.htmlFor this lesson, the website www.outerspaceuniverse.org gave our students the information they needed to create their own planets on the iPads, by answering the question:

The colors of each planet in the solar system.

We had each group pick a planet out of a hat. They then researched information on that planet using the iPad app Solar Walk (link above).

Credit to: This lesson was created by our team as part of a grant by the Geraldine R. Dodge foundation. Training on arts integration was given, as part of the grant, by the Rutgers Graduate School of Education.

Kids love graffiti, nowadays known as ‘urban art’. I am pretty useful at lettering and often my students ask me to teach them how to do it.

Graffiti has always been fashionable but has never been mainstream - there is something subversive and anarchistic about graffiti and some of the websites I will show you represent this side of urban art extremely well. Here are some of the websites I use with my students:

My school is an IB school. We follow the philosophy that to educate students requires an international understanding of the world, people and ideas. Part of the curriculum requires fifth graders to participate in an Exhibition where they use knowledge accumulated over six years of education to communicate their ideas on a global issue such as displacement, global warming, lack of education, pollution, world hunger, and limited access to fresh, clean water.

Last year, the fifth grade team asked me to brush students up on Publisher/PowerPoint/Word skills so they could construct their presentation. This year, I'm taking a different approach by encouraging students to think outside the box in communicating their ideas. We're spending six weeks studying and teaching each other some of the amazing online communication tools that offer motivating and inspirational ways to share thoughts.

Every day in my K-8 tech classes, I use a variety of cloud-based tools to enhance the learning experience for my students. There are more of these 'Web 2.0' tools than I can keep up with, but when you teach tech or coordinate technology for your school, 'keeping up' is part of your job.

Here's how I determine which of these hundreds (thousands?) of tools are student-ready:

• Before I introduce a tool to my class, I try it myself. Can I get it to work with ease? Is it intuitive or will it require teaching? Does it work as promised? Are there intrusive ads? Will students get distracted as they work through the steps required to complete the assignment?
• Next, I query my social networks to determine the experiences of fellow tech teachers. Have they had much success with this tool? Any problems they ran into? Is it stable? If my e-colleagues find that the glamour of the Web tool is only skin deep, I move on. Of course, sometimes I'm ahead of the curve and my colleagues are unfamiliar with the tool. In truth, that rarely happens. There's always someone somewhere who has experience.