What is an intranet? You can think of an intranet as a closed garden internet. Users of the intranet can "surf" within a closed environment. It's just a way of providing a standardised environment for managing information; in essence its a big, functional web site. Intranets are a quick and efficient method of delivering the right information into the right hands.
Offering no access to the outside world has obvious advantages for security. This does not mean that the intranet can not be connected to the Internet. It's just a way of providing a big web site. You can connect to the Internet or stay on your own, it doesn't matter.
Painsley hopes that its web site will grow as both staff and pupils come to realise it's importance. To this end we have started an Intranet Building Club which is open to the whole Painsley community. The main thrust of the club is via the Intranet Production Team who will carry out day to day management tasks and offer staff the service of web page or even web site development, and training if necessary.
The club was originally started in 1996 but did not do very well because pupils had to have pages published via a teacher. Of course teachers don't have that much time to keep uploading files to the server and so web site creation stagnated. The other problem was that we were file browsing rather than having the pages served by a web server. this meant that interactive pages could not be produced.
In 1997 we finally managed to get our Intranet running under a web server and fully automated the publishing of individual web sites. Pupils and staff could now produce material that they could immediately publish to the Intranet. Interest rocketed and we are now in the position where new pages are being added on a daily basis. This in itself brings about a problem which is keeping track of the new web sites and advertising the best ones to visit within the system.
It was time to start up the Intranet Club again. Pupils now track down new sites for us and inform us that they have a site that needs advertising on the Intranet. They run HTML courses for each other and have helped teachers to produce excellent web sites for their subjects. They recommend new software for the I.T department and help to track down problems. The pupils take photographs of the school using a digital camera and incorporate them into their sites. They manage the club themselves and have been instrumental in the promotion and success of the system in school.
At present there are over 20 members of the team, split into 6 groups. Each group has a team leader who is responsible to two Deputy WebMasters, who are in turn responsible to the WebMaster. Each group has specific duties such as error checking / problem identification and solution, graphics creation, departmental web site development, staff page development, administration web site development, pupil page and web site development and help development.