Origins of Reardan.net School Website

March 02, 2000 Localplanet Com Page 0:

File:2000-03-02-scl-0001-localplanet-com-p0-reardan-net-1600.jpg

www.reardan.net

By Pat Spanjer

Planning a trip near, through or to Reardan, Was.? You can turn to your computer for the town's up-to-the-minute weather report 24 hours a day. At reardan.net you can also learn about Reardan-Edwall Schools; athletic teams, Future Farmers of America (FFA) activities, and special events. All of this is available thanks to six enthusiastic Reardan High School Students who are dedicated to keeping the world informed about their conner of the world.

Visitors to the web site may be impressed by its professional visual appeal and its informative nature. What they may not realized is that the site is administred by responsible, knowledgeable, self-starting teens who require little supervision. In a closet-size room, 23 miles west of Spokane, at their 190-pupil school (grades 9-12), in the wheat town that boast a population of 500, the six webmasters establish their own goals for the site. Bolstered by positive feedback from the community that surrounds them, they create all of the graphics, text, and design. They update their site before, during and after school. They even work on the site from their home PCs on weekends, during holiday breaks, and the summer months.

The web site is the brainchild of Chris Rodkey, now a senior and site administrator, who started the site from scratch about two-and-a-half years ago "by playing around on a school computer," he said. "The site wasn't very good at first," Chris admits, "It was just a gray screen."

In time, teacher and site advisor Bryce Wilson provided Rodkey and other interested students with the supplies and small room now dubbed "the web room." The site runs on Windows NT Server 4.0. Visitors to the site are treated to a live web cam that reloads its picture every minute. The camera is usually mounted on the wall above four PCs in the web room or pointed out the window to view the gazebo behind the school. The site also utilizes a digital camera for still photos, MPEG movies, and MPEG three-layer sound clips on floppy disks. A lap top computer is transported to remote web site administration and updating, which allows coverage of sporting events and FFA activities from any location.

While the school acquired most of the equipment, the site benefited from a $1,000 grant from Avista last year, used to purchase a digital camera and upgrades, and Boeing donated a PC.

Rodkey, assistant webmaster Jarda Sand, and web apprentices Joe Perin, Herb Ahl, Curt Kvamme, and Randy Klein, receive class credits for their efforts, but their dedication and sense of responsibility for the site come from a deeper place.

"It's nice to be able to do this for the community," Perin, a junior said.

The school doesn't produce a student newspaper, so the web site provides a perfect paperless communications tool for the school and the community. The school's daily bulletins, which in the past was distributed on paper to every teacher, is now posted to the web site and utilized by most teachers as their start-up page when they log onto their computers each day. Phone calls to the high school office have been reduced because those with PCs and Internet access check the site for sports schedules, school board meetings, and other calendar highlights.

An alumni link to the sit has "really taken off," according to Rodkey. To date 212 Reardan High School alumni from as far back as 1943 have communicated with former classmates on the link.

The site's "community" has reached around the world, as evidenced by the e-mail responses covering the web room's orange walls.

Rodkey is especially fond of the following comment penned by a site visitor from Perth, Australia: "I'd like to say the virtual tour of your school is EXCELLENT. Well don and congratulations to whoever did it, they should be commended for it."

The "Amazing Web record" of 181 visitors to the site in one day (Dec. 13, 1999), is prominently displayed on the wall as well. Rodkey said more than 19,470 hits have been recorded since April 1, 1998.

The site has garnered a number of awards for excellence, which are listed on the site. Most notable is a four-and-a-half star rating from the Washington Virtual Classroom, ranking the site among the highest of school sites in the nation.

Rodkey, who is training the other webmasters to take the reins when he graduates, expects the site to continue to improve with age.

"We're always thinking about what people might want to see on the site," Rodkey said. "We're looking at other schools' sites to see what they're doing."

Klein, a sophomore, added that they working on a link to access homework assignments and a link for non-school community activities.

---

The site rocks! The graphics and overall flow of the site are tremendous. Microsoft should be proud of what you have created as high school students."

-Jeremy Silver, Microsoft developer coordinator