One of the elements of being part of a large system is that is that sometimes you lose autonomy for operational efficiency. It’s hard for an organization to allow everyone to do things differently and still both display some consistency and provide meaningful support.

In our district all of our schools are getting an update to their websites. The new sites are a lot more user-friendly and do provide a bit more choice. However when our tiny school, Inquiry Hub Secondary was built, our cofounding principal, now an Assistant Superintendent, decided that the school needed a different look online and we chose to build an Edublogs site, based off of WordPress. Our website looks nothing like any of the other schools in our district. And, we use it quite differently than most school do.

Two examples of how we use our website differently are that we emphasize the kind of projects students do on our website and we provide our PAC – Parent Advisory Committee with a very flexible WordPress blog as their ‘Parent Portal’.

Yesterday I got a call from our district principal in charge of the website transition for our schools and it was a great conversation where we discussed if our school was going to make the transition. It wasn’t a directive, it was a conversation. It was an opportunity for our school to participate or to keep autonomy.

I can’t express how much this is appreciated. It is challenging for large organizations to allow this kind of freedom, and often small, unique programs need to ‘toe the line’ and follow along so that operationally things go smoothly. For example, we are a Microsoft Office school district and if one school wanted to be something different, it could be a nightmare for tech support to provide trained support. However, all of our high schools already use Edublogs, so our website choice isn’t adding anything new with respect to support.

So, we were given a choice. It might seem like a small choice, but I understand the challenges to complexity it creates and I truly value being in an organization that provides such choice when it can.