Problem, Need, or Opportunity
Magnolia Elementary School is part of the Cajon Valley Union School District, about 20 miles east of central San Diego. It is a comparatively strong school technologically; It has a Computer Lab with 35 iMacs running version 9.2 of the Mac OS, each classroom has at least one iMac and between 2 to 4 older "multimedia" Macintoshes (5200 and 5500 series Power Macs that are somewhat underpowered given today's media-rich web content standards). As a 'Title 1' school (An institution with a large percentage of students on federal free-or-reduced lunch programs), it is technologically somewhat ahead of it's sister campuses in the district that are from middle-class neighborhoods that do not qualify for Title 1 funding. The campus has a T1 connection to the district; students have access to the World Wide Web through a district-run filter called iPrism. Currently, students are not provided school-furnished email or chat facilities.

Last year, the school's Computer Support Technician (Namely, me) and it's Site Lead Technology Teacher put together the school's web site. It contains information on the school, a message from the principal (circa 2000; she's tough to get to update her material), a calendar of school events, and links to a general set of web pages for students, teachers, and parents. After the initial design and content infusion by the CST, the SLT has done a yeoman's job of updating teacher pages to include online lesson plans and adding a parents link and updated students educational links.

However, there are no web pages specific to particular teachers or grade-levels that are directed toward their students and the parents of those students, such as updates on what the students are currently working on, what upcoming events specific to the class are slated, and what is expected of the students and their parents. While the SLT teacher is an "early adopter" of technology, only a few others are comfortable with computer and software basics, and most of the others are reluctant to use the computer for even the most rudimentary tasks, much less develop up-to-date pages for their students and parents. Last year, the school CST put together a Web-page building training session in hopes of convincing some teachers to start building their own pages. The class drew the typical cadre of technology-savvy teachers, but even they haven't had the time or interest to build class-specific web pages to add to the school site.

With a properly-motivated web-page builder acting as group typist (Namely, me again), and an interested group of teachers motivated to bring updated information to their students and parents, Magnolia Elementary school could significantly broaden the content and appeal of their existing web pages.

Audience
The audience for these pages will be the children and their parents of the teachers group developing content and directing design of these pages. In addition, if these pages are well designed and contain compelling content, they can act as an impetus for other teachers on campus to build pages specific to their students and parents. That would make these interested students a secondary audience. Another potential audience segment might include Educational activists (Say, Green Party members involved in the development of the State Party platform plank on Education & Children's Welfare) who may be interested in what is being learned inside the actual classrooms of state K-12 campuses and use Magnolia's classroom pages as an exemplar.

A very tertiary audience exists consisting of the school's CST and SLT, and the district Technology Facilitator, to make sure that the pages conform to the standards of the district (Standards that are still in the process of being specified).

Users Needs
I spent several days with 3 dozen students and parents of the proposed web site (Rough translation: I got married at my parents home near Los Angeles this last Sunday, spending the preceding Wednesday thru Saturday setting up tables, chairs, favors, decorations, etc. and spending the following Monday and early Tuesday taking down said tables, chairs, etc., ad nauseam, and as a result spoke to not a soul about the web site and what their needs would be). In my fantasy discussion with the students and parents, here is an instructor mandated bulleted list of the most crucial needs. This list will be updated within 48 hours to reflect interviews with actual students and parents from the concerned classes. Now it reflects my belief about what the students and parents would like to see.

• The students wanted access to their current grades almost unanimously. They want to know how they are doing with respect to the rest of the class (They expressed interest in knowing what other students are doing, but can make due with general statistics about the class without finding out about students they feel they're competing with).
• Some students were interested in upcoming tests and their content.
• Most students wanted to know when field trips were scheduled for. Others wanted to know about special lunch days and other special purchase days.
• Many parents wanted to be able to have forms (For instance, field trip attendance forms, and picture day purchase forms) accessible and submissible through the web instead of via hardcopy they had to fill in by hand and have their kids turn in.
• Almost all parents wanted to know how their kids are doing in school, regularly updated to reflect accurately their current grade.
• Most parents want to know how their children are behaving in class. Many of these want to know the standards of behavior, and what the consequences of misbehavior are.
• A number of parents requested information on how their current lessons tied in to state and federal standards.
• Some parents wanted to know about important upcoming testing dates, so they could help prepare their children.
• Some parents wanted data on how previous students of their children's teacher fared on standardized tests compared to other children at Magnolia, other children in the CVUS District, and other students across the state.
• A few parents were interested in the school PTA and how they could become involved.

Environment
The Primary users (Students in these classes and the parents of these students) will most likely be accessing these pages from their homes (There are as yet no statistics indicating how many students have computers and what the speed of their computers and net connections are) and possibly from local libraries. Since a significant portion of the student population are Title 1 families, it can safely be assumed that these are not state-of-the-art computers with high-speed connections. Libraries will have significantly faster computers and net connections. In addition, Magnolia Elementary school sponsors 'Camp Magnolia' nights on campus at regular intervals, where parents of students can come and access the student's rooms and the school Computer Lab. Their Web access during these times will be very fast.

Due to the low speed and computing power of most of the users, media-rich content will be kept to a minimum. There will likely be some images of students of the class (Either scanned in or downloaded from one of the schools 2 digital cameras), possibly some video-on-demand for higher-powered users uploaded from one of the district's 3 digital camcorders, but mostly text and light graphics. It is much easier to regularly update web pages whose content doesn't require painful calisthenics to create and upload. And the end goal is for the teachers to ultimately take over regular page upkeep.

Resources and Limitations
The resources for these pages are the lesson plans and policies and procedures for the classrooms involved. In addition, the school Site Lead Technology teacher has come up with a list of educational links that include on-line lesson plans that can be used to augment and complement regular classroom learning (And, ultimately, it is hoped, become an integral part of regular classroom learning). It will be the responsibility of the web developer to initially determine copyright requirements and obtain permission for site publication/reprint, but this information will be passed down to the teachers providing the crux of the content so that they can ultimately take over all aspects of web page development. Once the pages are completed to the satisfaction of the teachers, they can be passed on to the SLT for upload onto the school site. Current district policy requires one person at each campus to take ultimate responsibility for the page content (Usually the principal, but in Magnolia's case, the SLT); as a result, teachers are not provided with the ability to upload their own pages.

The limitations will be primarily the motivation of the teachers, initially just to provide content, ultimately to take over regular page update. Another limitation will be getting the pages onto the net after they've been constructed or updated. The SLT at Magnolia is the only one with permission to update pages (Along with the school CST, but this is unique to the relationship of the current CST to the school). As a result, subsequent page update will have to go through the SLT, and it will be dependent on her availability and interest. Finally, there are limitations in the technology that the page developer has access to and whether he can incorporate it into the pages. Access to student grades will require password access to the grade lists and dynamically constructed pages using ASP technology that the current developer isn't familiar with; these passwords cannot be the same as those used for typical student computer access, since current passwords are based on a simple system (First character of last name, first character of first name) that would give each student access to any other student's grades.