Establish single-source mentality. You can link to the same
document from several locations. Save storage space by
keeping redundancy in check.
Follow the three-click rule. This dictates that all users should
be able to access the content or page they are looking for in
three clicks or fewer.
Use consistent navigation and naming conventions. This makes
it easier to find what you are looking for and gives staff a
clear path for uploading their own materials.
Ensure staff can access the site remotely. It’s a 24/7 digital
world, and your system must accommodate this.
Train the Squires
Finally, don’t forget to train the staff! You’ve become an intranet expert, but most staff members won’t know what its
purpose is or how they should interact with it. Begin at the
beginning by helping all staff access and tour the site, upload documents, delete documents, find information, and
so on. Train stakeholders and interested staff to take ownership of document libraries, lists, and pages. As people begin
using the intranet more frequently, show them what management of those sites looks like, and make sure to provide
hands-on training on any new components you implement.
Part of our intranet site houses a library of Camtasia tu-
torials that staff can watch as needed to learn about the fea-
tures of our intranet, in addition to several other education
technology tutorials. At the beginning of the year, all staff
members attend a session about the intranet, and we offer
periodic trainings throughout the year to those who need
it or want to do more.
The Adventure Continues
We don’t want to lose sight of the intranet’s original purpose of taming our digital clutter beast, so we have begun
to design an intranet governance plan ensuring that future
iterations of the site will maintain relevance and adhere to
our initial design principles. We’ll continue to edit so that
the site doesn’t become stale or grow out of control, just
like those old file shares.
And now we’re well on our way to our next adventure:
making some significant strides in how we effectively
share and collaborate by leveraging colleague connections
through user profiles.
Ultimately, our intranet must support good teaching
practices for the benefit of our students. Now that our site
contains the documents, calendars, and tools that we use
every day, we will continue to pursue new and unexplored
possibilities to improve our staff’s collaboration, communication, and consistency.
Rhonda Spradling spent seven years in IT before
becoming a high school English teacher. She is
currently an English teacher, webmaster, and staff
developer at Liberty High School in Colorado Springs,
Colorado, USA, and was recently an instructor for
Academy Online High School.
Support. Intranet content and
design are typically managed
at the school level by the same
teachers who access it. As they
use the intranet more frequently,
they learn more about its capabilities and eventually become
the network of experts who help
support it.
Affordability. technically speak-
ing, an intranet site is protected
by a firewall and restricted to
internal access only, as the in-
formation it houses should be
accessed only by employees.
however, cash-strapped schools
can make a variety of solutions
work as an “intranet” as long
as they implement proper
permissions and password pro-
tections. Free web tools, such
as Google sites and Word-
press, let you set up a web-
site solution for your intranet.
tiered-pricing web tools include
Ning, which can help schools
seeking to improve collabora-
tion and communication, and
wikis, which can help with con-
tent and document manage-
ment (pBworks and Wikispaces
are two of my favorite wiki
builders). Your school or district
might also allow you to create
an intranet as a password-
protected part of your school’s
external website, or they might
have an enterprise-level solution
bundled with other products
they use, such as microsoft’s
sharepoint. most of the free
and tiered-price solutions equip
you with all the basics, and
they provide enough custom-
ization capability to give even
your “techiest” staff members
their geek fix. the downside
is that what you gain in cost
savings with these low-cost
solutions will likely be matched
with file-size limitations and a
sacrifice of storage space, so
be sure to factor that in when
you choose a platform.
Faced with this dilemma, we
decided to go the enterprise-
solution route. Because
our school already had
microsoft sharepoint as
part of the package they had
purchased under our volume
license, this tool initially incurred
no additional cost. We housed it
on an older “spare” server that
our phenomenal tech crew set
up at our school and used for
calendaring and testing before
we got a hold of it.
once the district latched on to
our intranet plan, they began
hosting sharepoint on district
servers so that all schools could
run it from the centralized location. For us, having the ability
to worry very little about hitting
space thresholds was worth the
cost of maintaining a server and
hard drive.
