Guest posting to voced-coord email list.
Item 8 of 15:

Date:Sun, 26 Jul 1998 23:09:38 +1000
To: voced-coord@owl.qut.edu.au
From: Lenny Eagles
Subject: VocEd: Lenny Eagles - Online Guest. Second Comment

Greetings again fellow on-line voced coordinators,

Following on from my introduction on Friday, I will start to address a few of the questions Janine has asked that we would cover.

What is the purpose of your site and for which audiences?
In my introduction I had indicated that our traineeship homepage had "evolved" out of the Careers page within the Christian Community High homepage.... as you will see from the Introduction to the CCHS site, it was set up with the intention of building community or at least another element of community. Within the constraints of time and technology I think the teacher (James Doyle) who grew the site has done a great job. When in Term 3 and 4 1997, I had the "bright idea" of presenting an outline of what CCHS was doing in the area of Voced we (myself and James) tried to maintain the "look" of the rest of the CCHS site ie. aimed at student's first and then others. Unlike the rest of the CCHS site I quickly realised that the traineeship homepage was going to have a much wider audience.

This audience(s) has grown to include :
free email address - HOTMAIL, if they did not already have one.)
the cluster schools staff (for some schools this was a new thing to do...email and the net)
as a way of communicating/marketing to many diverse parties what we were doing and plan to do (especially govt. depts)
a way of sharing resources with other schools and
a means of people communicating with our program.

What would you do differently if you were starting again?
At this point, Nov.1997, I now realise that I probably should have moved to set up the traineeship homepage as a seperate entity. This would have made me address all of the issues that we are now having to work around..things like:
having our own domain
having an ISP who could provide the level of service and technology needed to do more interactive things eg. it took along time just to get a counter facility on our server, not to mention things like e-mail proformas, video streaming and chat sites.
thinking through all of the purposes of the site and designing them in at the start, including costings ie.the sort of things Janine is very good at addressing in her VECO on-line workshops and which Gary has also made mention when he outlined how the St George site was started.

'What did it cost to set up your site - in $ and time?' and 'How is your site maintained'?
What really happened for us had a touch of the miraculous in that at around the same time as I had the idea of a traineeship homepage, a family arrived at our church and school who had been involved in setting up and running a Christian website for the Atlanta Olympics and was starting a similar (More Than Gold) site for the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

Have a look at the Unity by Design homepage at http://www.unity.com.au where you can meet Allan Carrington who has done the job of growing the site to be what it is now. This has progressed through me having a "good idea" Allan then asking me:
"what do you want to do and to whom do you want to do it", with Allan then making suggestions on what is technically feasable. All of this has been very low budget with the cost of site development paid for by CCHS in negotation with Allan...it may have cost about $1,000 so far but this is nowhere near the real "time on task".

The thing that has been invaluable in working with Allan it that he has passed on to me (in managable lumps) the training to be able to manage the site within it present format. This has been really rewarding, to be able to edit the text on pages, to add logos and giffs, to add new pages and to set up documents to either download or read on-line. I can now do all this within Netscape Communicator 4.05 and using Cute FTP for uploads. The only tricky bit in all this has been a few glitches with Allan working on Macs and myself on a PC. I am also in the fortunate (or am I just silly) position of being able to do all this from school or home!

Gary also made a point of the importance of having control over the mangement your site at least on a day to day basis. I am also keen to keep up with each new level of complexity. I also realise I need to be passing my technical skills on to at least one other person (you know the "getting hit by a bus syndrome")

Future Directions?
Our very first next step is to get a new ISP / Server (probably Ozemail unless anyone can tell me a better service) who has on their server provision for the latest innovations...things like the video streaming Gary is starting to use.

Some kind of Chat site or Netmeeting facility is being explored for both trainees and schools although the limiting factor here may the level of equipment and access across schools.

Along with Mission Australia Group Training Co. we are very keen to explore Distance Education on the Internet as a teaching and learning tool not just across Sydney but into Regional schools and communities.

I await your comments and questions and again hope this is of some aid to other programs looking at homepages. Lenny

Sydney Christian Schools Vocational Education Cluster
Mr Lenny Eagles - Cluster Coordinator
Christian Community High School
59 Regent Street, Regents Park NSW 2143
Phone (02) 9644 5144 Fax (02) 97437082 Mobile 0417426628
e-mail voced@cchs.nsw.edu.au
http://www.cchs.nsw.edu.au/voced School-based Part-Time Traineeships