Assignment #2

While looking through DFG (District Factor Groups) categories and considering the 549 districts statewide,  I chose DFG 'FG'. More specifically, I will be exploring the district website of Shore Regional High School. I chose this website because I love the Jersey shore and I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at a High School that has students from multiple towns. At first glance of the district's web page, I found it to be very informative. After reading the article 'Why in the World Wide Web' by Jamie McKenzie I thought the website hit on many of the important aspects McKenzie outlined in the article. There are multiple paths you can take from the school's home page. Tabs included are: Home, About our District, Academics, Activities, Athletics, Faculty Web Pages, Parent Information, and Calendar. While considering these tabs alone, one would believe you could find out just about anything about this district.

I tried to picture myself as a parent while I was coasting through the website. While wearing my imaginary parent hat, I found it easy to navigate through the site and find out information about the curriculum, community, program studies, athletics, and much more. The information displayed was more than enough for a parent to use as a starting point if they were "shopping" for schools.

Another interesting part of the district's website, was a directory to teachers websites. I chose to take a closer look at  Mr. Aprahamian's page. I was very impressed with the website, and as soon as I entered the space there was the teachers contact information and mission statement. I always find it useful to know what people's mission statements are. I just think it is nice to know the purpose of what people are thinking and how they plan on getting to where they need to be. There is also a short bio on the teacher that is nice to read a little on the teachers background. Also, there are links available to each class he teaches along with a calendar for upcoming events/assignments.

McKenzie points out four logical goals for a districts websites: "They introduce visitors to the school, they point to excellent information on the larger Web, they offer an opportunity for the publishing of student works to both a local and a global audience, and they provide rich data locally collected on curriculum related topics." I think that Shore Regional H.S. tapped on these four points very well. I enjoyed scrolling through and reading on the many different opportunities the school has to offer. 


I thought this experiment to be pretty cool. I have never visited another schools website other than my own (Bernards Township). When comparing Shore Regional to my hometown website, I felt that my hometown maybe should contact Shore Regional to get some ideas on how to make their website more attractive.