Adrian webmasters
By Jennifer Colton - Argus Observer
Friday, March 2, 2007 1:04 PM PST
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| Jennifer Colton | Argus Observer
Adrian High School Webmasters Kirsten Phillips and Jorge Michel work on different aspects of the school Web site Thursday in Adrian. Eleven students maintain all aspects of the site: www.adriansd.com |
While Dreamweaver, CoffeeCup and FrontPage may sound like comic book characters, a collection of students at Adrian High School can recognize those names as computer programs used for designing, troubleshooting and publishing on the Internet.
Eleven students in the “WWW Desktop” class at Adrian High School create and maintain the different pieces of the district Web site, www.adriansd.com.
Students in the desktop portion learn Web page design and write and format articles or essays for the site, Geary Johnson, class instructor, said Thursday. More advanced students become webmasters.
“They are the ones who maintain our site, troubleshoot it,” Johnson said.
Three seniors, Jorge Michel, Kirsten Phillips and Amanda Simpson, serve as webmasters for the Adrian High School site while another senior, Kat Sillonis, handles work with Photoshop — editing photos and images as well as designing and producing original page background designs — and acts as webmaster for the Adrian kindergarten through eighth-grade Web site.
Thursday afternoon, Michel worked with CoffeeCup Direct FTP to substitute the outdated February calendar with one for March. Sillonis resized the page background for the girls softball team page with Adobe Photoshop while Phillips entered the new schedule onto the page.
“We do make all our own backgrounds for our pages,” Johnson said. Most of the backgrounds fall to Sillonis, 17, who said she has become addicted to Photoshop after being introduced to it last year by her parents.
“I like how I can be creative without having to use my hands to draw something,” she said. “I’m just able to do a lot of things. I’m actually looking at ways I can do this type of thing in college.”
Michel, 18, has been involved with the school Web site for five years, after choosing to take the desktop class as an eighth-grader instead of choir.
“Originally, in eighth-grade, you had to take choir,” Michel, 18, said. “My friend and I didn’t want to take choir, so they brought us up here.”
Now a senior, Michel has worked with the Web site for five years.
“We’ve done a lot of readjustments this year,” he said. “It’s a great Web site. I think it’s really complete because you can go to everything going on in the year, homecoming, sports. It’s very well updated, a lot of time and effort.”
The students work with up-to-date technology thanks to a grant the school received in 2002 and program donations by Eric Ellis of Treasure Valley Community College, Johnson said.
“Not many Web sites like this are maintained just by the students,” Sillonis said. “It’s really high quality for this age level.”
Students have had full control of the site since 2003, Johnson said, and the classroom is now set up as a “work environment,” with comfortable chairs and specialized tables.
“There are kids in here right now who could go to work straight for a Web design company,” Johnson said. “I know they’re proud of the site. It gives our community an identity.”
