You Don't Have a Website

Teachers sometimes put in a help ticket asking something about "their" website, as if they have only one. I always have to ask them to specify which Powerschool class to which they are referring. In SVUSD, we have the ability to publish public websites in any number of ways. I'll try to clarify some of these a bit.

First of all, Powerschool Learning (formerly Haiku) is not built to be a web hosting platform. It is a Learning Management System (LMS), designed to work with classes of students in a blended environment. The capability to open a class and make it available to the general public is incidental, almost a side benefit. It was added to Haiku with the intent of allowing parents, community members, or colleagues to be able to see your class materials without having to log in. I understand that when Haiku was adopted in SVUSD, it was presented as a way to create public websites, but that's not what it's meant for. Those of you who have been frustrated with the limitations of designing your class as a public webpage have discovered this.

Next, you have a lot of Powerschool classes, whether you realize it or not. Each year, Technology Services automatically creates classes for you, based on your Aeries roster(s). You might use those classes, or you might ignore them and create your own. You have old classes that are still in the system, unless you intentionally disable them. As the years have passed, you have probably accumulated a large number of Poweschool "websites". Whether or not they are active or open to the public is up to you.

Finally, there are options other than Powerschool. Google Sites is now open for teachers to create and publish sites. If you haven't tried the new version of Sites, I think you will find it much easier to use than the previous version, which was clunky at best. It still doesn't have a full feature set, but Google is adding features on a regular basis. You could also use Weebly or Wix, or a variety of other free web hosting platforms, which make it easy to create and publish sites.

Once you have created your site, how can you share the address with your students, parents, and community? To have the site linked from your school's website, put in a help ticket with the address of your site, and our web developer Nancy Nguyen will link it. Better than that, use a link shortener like bit.ly or goo.gl to create a short link, and give that to students. Post it in your classroom, send it to parents through email, or put it on your class syllabus.

Having a public website is a part of being a teacher in 2017. Parents, colleagues, and students expect it, and making it easy to access helps communication among all groups.