Slate & Tablets

One of the most important and under-scrutinized pieces of a school is its website. School websites are often the first place teachers and administrators go to post important information, news, and curricular materials. To us, it’s almost insulting when it’s the last place students and parents go to get their information. I’ve seen many teachers get angry at students for not checking the website for meeting information, summer work, and the like. The reasons for this are pretty simple: school websites are not very good. Students are used to interacting with the eloquently coded programs they use on a daily basis, not the clunky kerfuffles that school websites tend to be. The reasons why they became outdated is a little more complex.

Let’s rewind to the dot com bubble. During this period, people knew they had to get on to the web and they knew they had to get there quickly. People were publishing anything and everything to the web, buying domains, selling them, seeking venture capital for various business ideas, and flopping. At this time, online school access was completely invisible, and basically no business was conducted via the internet for school.

Enter Blackboard. I have many things to say about Blackboard, but one can’t fault their ingenuity and their status as a pioneer of the industry during a dark era. Blackboard united many of the tasks that a school might want to do online under its own design and software umbrella. Schools had previously tried experimenting with building their own websites, which didn’t work due to the lack of technical prowess of those employed, so they turned to Blackboard which promised a relatively easy method of content management that was appealing to schools and administrators. Colleges were first, but many public schools soon followed. This model of “let someone else do the work for us” is a tested model that works in a number of areas. Databases, grade management, email, and anything else impersonal is what it is great for, because there needs to be no inside knowledge.

Schools couldn’t make that distinction, however, and while they struggled to keep up with the web from ten years ago, the internet has evolved. Quickly. As the chef and founder of Momofuku (one of our favorite NYC restaurants) mentions in a car commercial, “In this era of the cookie cutter, everything now, generic consumer society, it’s the human touch that really matters.” He’s got a point. Schools are still struggling to identify the best cookie cutter, “enterprise class” products that the rest of the internet adopted over the past 10 years.

Today, however, heavy emphasis is placed on design and branding, the importance of which simply cannot be understated. We owe a lot of this to Steve Jobs, whose branding wasn’t perfect, but whose pursuit of its perfection opened the eyes of a lot of people that it was truly important. People tried to copy the late genius’ style, but now there are plenty of companies branching out and inventing their own style. I look to brand pioneers like Chipotle, Geico, and Starbucks who have broken the mold and through various media have created a recognizable and powerful brand that is truly their own, and that others have tried to emulate.

Let’s do a thought exercise now. I’m assuming if you’re reading this, you work at a school or some organization. Think about the answer to the following question: what is your school great at? Not just good, but great.

Think about it…

Keep thinking…

Are you ready?

Here’s my answer: connecting students of diverse backgrounds across a tremendously large school. I would be willing to be that this is different than your answer. Administrators go through great lengths to communicate these strengths and identities inside a school, but they’re missing one of the most important places, and that’s online. A school’s entire online presence and brand should be tuned around the answers to this and several other specific questions. The problem is that they’re not, and that’s because schools, out of what they see as technological necessity, have turned to generic, one size fits all, cookie cutter website and management software.

I was discussing this with my PA the other day and we were comparing the website department of various organizations and that of schools. Most schools have zero people responsible for web development full time. If you use a similar informational site, like a magazine or online news outlet, they frequently have anywhere from 1-3 people who are responsible for development, full time. Many of these websites also have people working in their design department as well, which don’t exist in schools. We must ask ourselves, why? Why does this structure differ from the industry norm? There’s a reason many organizations have multiple full time developers and it’s because they think it’s vitally important to their success. It seems our schools either know something nobody else does, or are, again, too slow to adapt to current standards.