STUDENT LIFE AT GHCA

Only -26 days left until school starts!

I Think It's Time For Plan B

The student life pages have been relatively "dead" since they were spiced up last Spring. The key to the success of this page is student involvement, but nobody is chomping at the bit and knocking down Mr. Surran's door with new ideas, articles, etc.

I have an idea, but it will require your help. Are you familiar with something called Wikipedia? It is an online encyclopedia written not by professionals (though many submitters may be professional in their field), but by everyday people! Maybe you've also heard of Digg.com, a tech news site where the users submit stories and then vote on which stories make it to the home page. Well, I'm looking at making the student life pages something like a mix between Wikipedia, Digg, and MySpace, taking the good and leaving the bad, of course.

Here's how it would work. Students, using their passwords provided by the school, would be able to submit articles, stories, "school news", rants, or just thoughts about school life to our website. All these submissions would live on a special "editing room" page that only other students could see. Other students then can vote to have the submissions they like placed on the homepage. Submissions can be tagged as either "open" or "closed" by the submitter. This means that open submissions could be edited by other students. This is good for things like news, events, announcements, etc. Other things like personal stories, etc., could be tagged as closed so that they can be voted on but not changed. Of course, the webmaster has the right to edit any content to keep it clean and in the spirit of our website. Also, your name will be tagged to any "published" work, so you'll want to be nice in what you write

The nice thing about this model is that students will be able to maintain the student life section of the website without my being in the middle (which frees me up). You'll be able to submit and vote and change the content even from your own homes! Sections like the "photo of the week" will also be driven by student submissions and votes. I'm hoping to add "The Witness Stand" section where students can post testimonies, and also a prayer request page that would be viewable only by students. Of course, Student Chat will be a part of this too.

The tricky part is that making a website that can do all this is A WHOLE LOT OF WORK! We're talking cutting-edge Web 2.0 here, so it will be later in the school year before it becomes fully operational as described. In the meantime, take the poll and let me know that it is worth my time doing this (no sense building a student-driven website if students aren't going to use it). Tell your friends about the poll and get them to vote, too. Don't have a password yet? See Mr. Surran!