We’ve had a couple of people now ask us how to use the free Calendar feature in Jotter Site. It’s a really popular feature, present on hundreds of our websites already, but it can be a bit confusing to set up, so we’re here to guide you through it.
If you’ve ever used a calendar app before, whether it’s Google Docs, Microsoft Outlook or Apple’s Calendar, the interface should be immediately familiar to you, but it can take some time to learn where things are and what they’re known as in Jotter.

It can look a bit daunting at first, so we’ll go over it piece by piece.

• Add Event – This button, at the top, lets you create an event or reminder
• Add Calendar – This button lets you create calendars – sort of a category within the main app, that helps with organisation.

And then the options at the side:

• Your calendars – Your calendars will appear here, you can click them to toggle their display on the panel to the right.
• Settings – Change the important things
• Recycle Bin – Where deleted calendars go

We’ll start with Add Calendar – this is the simplest and easiest thing to do, and will really help you with both getting information out and categorising it at the back.

The name is the name of the calendar, and the description is, well, self-explanatory. I’ve categorised mine into “Clubs and Performances”, “Parents’ Evenings” and “PE” – all things parents might like to know about, though of course what you do is your own choice! Next, let’s have a look at Add Event.
This is a bit more complex than the last one, so we’ll go over it bit by bit again.

• Calendar – Specify which calendar you’d like the event attached to
• Title – What you want to call the event
• Start date, start time, end date, end time – When the event will begin and end, or alternatively check All Day for all-day events.
• Repeat – Set how often the event will repeat, if it’s a repeat event – see below
• Where – The location
• Description – What people will see when they click on the event
• Colour – You can colour-code events to make the calendar a bit easier to read

The Repeat dialog can be a bit daunting, so here’s a run-down of that
Again, we’ll go by it bit by bit:

• Repeat – whether you’d like it done daily, weekly, monthly or yearly
• Every – how many of those time intervals should pass between each event
• Repeat on – which days you’d like
• Starts – the first instance of the event
• Ends – The end conditions for it – whether it’s endless, ends on a specific date or after a set number of occurrences.

You’ll get a handy summary at the bottom of what you’ve selected – you can see my event is set to repeat every two weeks on Tuesday and Wednesday for 10 weeks.
Once that’s done, just press Create Event to send it all live. Made a mistake? Don’t worry, by clicking on the event in the calendar view you’ll be able to make edits to specific instances or even entire series of events.
Now let’s take a look at the Settings page. This is where you can start to get really fancy with what you’re doing.

Here you can import or export your calendars to use in whatever app you’d like.

• Edit details – Change the description or name of a calendar
• Share – Determine which groups can edit your calendars – you might want to give the PTA special access to an events calendar, for example
• Export – Export the calendar in iCal format, for use in your app of choice
• Import – Take an iCal file and put it into Calendar
• Delete – Remove the calendar to the Recycle Bin
• Public URL – create a text string you can use to import an automatically-updating calendar feed in your personal calendar app.

Okay, so you have a calendar now, and it’s looking great. Putting it on your website, ePortfolio or Learnsite is really easy, just go to the page in Edit mode and click Insert Item, then Calendar.

Then you’ll see this dialog:

Choose the ones you want to display using the buttons at the top (you can pick more than one!), then click Choose, and there you have it, your calendar is embedded. Anyone can scroll through the embedded calendar using the controls at the top, including viewing things on a per-week or even per-day basis! You can change the default view using the grey bar at the top of the screen when in Edit mode and the calendar is selected.
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This is something that a lot of people might not be aware of – School Jotter includes some simple, easy-to-use tracking tools right within its interface. There’s no need to set up complicated Google Analytics tracking profiles, you can get the relevant information from right within Jotter Site itself!
This is something that’s actually really easy to set up, you just need to log into the Jotter backend, go to your site and click Manage > Web Stats.

And that’s pretty much all there is to it! After clicking that, you’ll see the following screen:

You can drill down by page, to see where people are visiting on your website, as well as on what days. The arrows at the top let you change which month you’re looking at, and you can also see a longer-term picture with the “Year” tab to the left.

What these figures mean

There can sometimes be a bit of confusion over the difference between Hits and Visits:

• Hits – Number of times a web page has been loaded
• Visits – The number of unique visitors to your school website – one visitor can generate multiple hits through refreshes, hence why the hits number is always a bit higher.

By properly paying attention to your web stats you can work out the behaviour-flow of site visitors and plan out your content accordingly.

Last week we showed you how to use Jotter site to send email updates to parents. This week we’ll be covering how you can use Site to upload and disseminate newsletters.
As with last week, you’re going to want to go into Edit mode then click Manage, but this time we’re going into News.

Clicking it will bring up the dialogue box below – it’s empty by default, but I pre-populated mine with some content a few months back. The two big options are Add News and News Categories. The former is for content, the latter for organisation, we’ll deal with the latter first, to give us a nice framework.

 
Categories are handy both for organising your content in the backend, and also for specifying feeds later on. Adding them is just a matter of clicking News Categories, then clicking Add News Category to get the following view. Fill it out with relevant information (for example, you might want a category for sporting achievements, or for upcoming school trips).

We can now go back to the main news dialogue and click Add News to begin crafting our news item.

Here’s a brief overview of each section:

• Category: The category you specified earlier
• Title: What you want the title of your post to be
• Description: Flavour text, displayed as an overview of the story
• Content: The main body, where your news item will go
• Image: If you want to illustrate your story, you can attach an image

When you’re done, click Add News. Now you need somewhere to publish it. Go to the page you’d like to insert your news feed on and, in Edit mode, click Insert Item, then News.

By default, the box you put in will automatically display the five most recent news items you’ve created, including their titles and descriptions. Clicking on the news box while in edit mode will bring up the following bar at the top of your page.

You can customise this box with the drop-down menus as follows:

• Type: Whether you want the news box to be active or archived – if you have a dedicated news page, you might wish to display news from the past with less information.
• Category: The category you created earlier – by default it will pull through all news
• Image: Whether or not the articles have images next to them
• Articles: How many pieces of news will display by default
• Pagination: On dedicated news websites, setting this to “on” will automatically load new pages when you reach the bottom of the current one

As you can see, you can customise this to look pretty much any way you like!
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Parents want to know what’s happening at your school – what’s the best way to tell them? In the past it was crumpled sheets of A4 hastily stuffed into folders and rucksacks, to hopefully be handed to parents a few weeks later. Luckily, your website lets you manage this in a much easier way. Two ways, in fact! This week we’ll be looking at email newsletters, and next week we’ll cover news items.

Part One: Newsletters

Newsletters are emails you can send out to your subscriber list. Setting them up couldn’t be simpler either.
First, you’re going to want to create some Newsletters in your Jotter Site backend. Log in, visit your homepage and click on the Manage tab, then click “Newsletters”.


You’ll see the following screen, showing a list of any emails you might have created – by default though, this will be blank. You’ll notice two options at the top: Add Newsletter and Subscriptions.

First, we’ll look at the subscriptions area, this is where you manage who the emails will go to.


We’ll go through the buttons at the top in order now:

• Add subscription – Allows you to manually input a username and email
• Download spreadsheet – Lets you export your subscribers to a CSV file
• Import spreadsheet – Lets you import a CSV of names and email addresses

Additionally, you can edit and unsubscribe individual addresses manually by using the Edit and Unsubscribe links to the right of each field.
Please note, you can only have the one address book, so we recommend using it for parents and interested parties.
Now we can go back and look at the Add Newsletter dialogue
To anyone who’s used an email client before, this should be pretty straightforward:

• Title: The subject line of the email you want to send
• Description: The text and content you’d like to include in the email
• Date: When you plan to send the email
• File attachment: Used for things like images or PDFs

Once that’s filled in and saved, all you need to do is click “Email to subscribers” on the main newsletter screen (the second image), and confirm you want to send it. And that’s it, you’re done! Next week, we’ll be showing you how to embed newsletters into your site, for a self-updating page.
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This article originally appeared in email format as part of our Jotter Tips of the Week programme – to sign up for this, click here.
An image gallery can be a great way to show off photos both of your school and events you might hold. It’s a more user-friendly way of showing these than simply displaying them as image files in an endlessly scrolling webpage. Luckily, School Jotter makes it dead-easy to insert image galleries into your website, Learnsite or ePortfolio.
First of all, you’re going to want to make sure you’ve uploaded the images you want the gallery to display. You can do this by going to Manage > My Files > Upload files from the Site editor, or by clicking the Files app in your dashboard. Drag the files into the dialog box that pops up (you might also want to put them in a specific folder, but this is up to you). Once they’re all sitting there, click “Start upload” and they should do just that. Press “OK” to finish.

That’s actually the hardest part of this task done! All you have to do now is go to the page you want the gallery to be on while in Editing mode, then click Insert > Gallery.

You’ll be asked where you want to put it on the page, then you’ll see the following dialog box pop up. Navigate to wherever it was you uploaded your images and click the blue “select” button on each, then click “Choose”.

The default settings are probably fine, but you can adjust the sizes of the thumbnails, captions and more by using the grey bar which appears at the top of the page when you click on the Gallery in edit mode.

You can adjust the order the images appear in, or add more images, by clicking on the three dots in the grey bar at the top, shown here to the left of “Captions”.

And that’s all there is to it! You can add any image you like to galleries, and you can have as many galleries as you want – use them to make your site look even better.

A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website, which is often organised into a structured hierarchy. It’s useful to have, not only for when people want to be able to find all of the pages, but it helps Google, Bing and other search engines index your site so when people search for you they can easily find it. Continue reading →

By Becky Cunliffe
There are many posts online about how to make a great website, and many similar posts on what to avoid; these tend to be fairly generic. In this blog I’ll summarise some of the key things that, in my opinion, should be considered, and what should be forgotten about, when it comes to school websites in particular.
My top tips:

1. Remember the Purpose – It’s important to remember what the point of the website is. Is it to encourage parents to use your school? Is it a portal for parents? Is it for students to check for events?
   Remember you may have other systems or sites for these purposes, so link to them rather than try to fit it all on your website.
2. Make it easy to find – Navigation is crucial and can lose visitors; if it is not easy to see where to go, they may give up.
3. Planning – Rushing into the site may result in bulky pages, so always try to plan out what pages you are going to have and what should be on them. Don’t forget to use links to try and keep pages short, if they want more information they can go to the additional pages.
4. Update it – Nothing discourages visitors more than finding an event being advertised that was over 5 years ago, as this creates the impression that the site may no longer be in use. Likewise, try to remove your old website from the web to stop parents ending up in the wrong place.
5. Use colour – Try to not make the website a textbook. Add some relevant images or colour to the page, but do make sure your page is still readable and easy on the eyes.

I would strongly recommend avoiding the following:

1. Sound – This can startle visitors and often they will simply mute their speaker. It also asks the question, why do you need that sound?
2. Animation – Small gifs can be useful but try to avoid anything that changes the whole page, such as leaves falling down the page. This just causes annoyance when trying to view the page and can get in the way.
3. Several-tiered menus – Keep your navigation to 1-2 submenus only. At a certain point the visitor may be lost, or if its a hover-over menu they may lose their place.
4. Large files – Keep images, files, videos etc to a smaller size so visitors are not waiting on downloads.
5. Too much info – Remember, a website is there to show information, but try not to overwhelm it with too many pages. Use the other Jotter Apps and any system or sites you may have, and try to remember what the purpose is of each to avoid duplication.

We have recently introduced a new feature to School Jotter 2 which allows you to make content blocks on the website time sensitive.
In the example below,we are going to create an important notice that is set to display between a specific set of dates. Here is how to do it, step by step:
 
Step 1:
Make sure you are logged in to the website and click Edit Page in the green bar at the top.
 
Step 2:
Click on Insert Item and decide which type of block you are going to add to the page. In this example, we are going to add a Text block, so select Text from the Insert Item menu. See the screenshot below for illustration.

 
Step 3:
Decide where you are going to add the block to the page and click the black Insert text here bar.
 
Step 4:
Type in the text you wish to use as an important notice. In this example, we are going to type “IMPORTANT NOTICE: School re-opens on 5th September.”
 
Step 5:
Highlight the text that you have just typed in and use the font size icon in the toolbar to set the size of the text. If this text is going to be an important notice, make sure that it is large enough so that it is clearly visible on the page. In our example, we are going to set the font size to 18pt.
 
Step 6:
When you are in Edit Page mode, you will notice that a set of white configuration icons appear when you click on a specific block on the page. In order to make our Important Notice time sensitive, we are going to left click on the block we have created and then we are going to left click the white cog shaped icon. See the screenshot below which shows where this is located.

 
Step 7:
You then need to enter the dates that the block will be visible from and when it will be visible to. You can enter the date directly into the box provided using the correct format of yyyy-mm-dd. Alternatively, when you click the box, you will be provided with a mini calendar that can be used to select the date manually.

 
Step 8:
Once you have entered a date into each box, you can click the Save button, then click Save and Publish.
Please note that the time sensitive block you have created will always be visible when you are logged into the site as an admin. You should therefore log out of the website to test to see whether the time sensitive block appears or not.
 
If you need further help with editing your School Jotter 2 website, please visit our new online help system at http://wa.schooljotter2.com/

Making use of new the features for tables in School Jotter 2

Tips from Primary Support Desk Analyst, Matthew Basierak
 
On the support desk we are often asked how to add and work with tables in School Jotter 2 and we have recently introduced some new features to the system which makes working with tables easier than before.
You can now change the colours of individual cells in a table.  In order to get started you first need to create an empty table by using the table icon in the grey editing toolbar.

Once you have added the table to the page, you need to select and highlight the cells where you wish to change the colour.
See the screenshot on the right.
Once you have highlighted the cells, the next step is to go to the Table menu in the grey toolbar, select the Cell option from the drop down menu then click on Cell Properties.  See the screenshot below which shows exactly where this option is located.

You should now find yourself in the Cell properties dialogue box.  If you then click the advanced Tab in the following window there are options to set the border width, style and colour.
In order to change the colour you can either enter a value into the background field, or alternatively you can click on the small back to the right hand side.  After selecting the colour you will notice that this information is automatically added to the style box.
Please see the screenshot below, which shows the background colour box with a new colour added to it.  You can now click on the OK button to save the changes.

If you need further help on working with tables, please see our help guide using the link below:
http://wa.schooljotter2.com/sites/insert-items/tables
 

For those of you who follow us on Twitter (@webanywhere_ltd) you’ll know that we held a webinar yesterday, Improving Literacy Skills Through Blogging, using the Bloganywhere app in School Jotter.
It was a 30-minute presentation and demonstration about using blogs in the classroom to create a buzz about literacy, and subsequently help improve pupil attainment.
Our e-learning expert Tracey Gentle took delegates through how you might use blogs with your pupils and eventually the wider school community, and how your school can set up free trials of the blog app. If you missed the webinar, we recorded it – and you can watch it here at your leisure.
 

 
If you have any questions regarding the apps we have available, or need help with parental engagement, just get in touch here.
We would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a fabulous summer break and look forward to working with you all in September.