Why do we like this site?

It grows increasingly more difficult to choose the Star School of the Month. Most of the websites submitted to us now are -doing- the things we recommend: streamlining graphics, emphasizing content over flash (not Flash, mind you), providing a variety of useful data to anyone and everyone in the school, and its community.

This is a good thing. We're glad to see it happening. But it makes our job so much harder. Ah, well. As the overall quality of the websites submitted to us improves, so must the standards for our award. And thus, this month's Star School of the Month is Pittsford-Sutherland High School, Pittsford, New York, USA.

When I first looked up the Pittsford-Sutherland site, I liked the initial introduction. A simple graphic declaring who they are, and immediately following were links to the various types of information on the site. Then I realized just how many links there were. And they were to departments, not to individual classrooms. It was obvious from the first glance that there was a huge amount of information being presented.

Further browsing showed the site was being regularly updated. In fact, it's still partially under construction. But the parts that are done amazed me. It isn't often that I immediately drop a co-worker a line while browsing a site and tell them, "go to this URL, you have to see what they're doing here."

What are they doing? Pittsford-Sutherland has gone beyond the standard "here are weather maps for our area" type of community information. The lists of links to information about the area, about the school district, reference information, universities, alumni, about everything, are pages long. And while almost every website we see now has information about homework assignments, or resources for extra-curricular research regarding whatever the students' classes are studying at the moment, Pittsford-Sutherland has one feature we've not seen anywhere else: students can submit their lab data sheets and lab write-ups for Physics classes via web-forms. Yep, electronic submission of school-work, at one's leisure. This is more advanced than the implementations of the WWW in education at UNC, where we attend college.

I can't even begin to describe in detail all the reasons this site has for being our Star School of the Month, and do it justice. Every faculty member has an email address, listed on the site. There are resources for downloading software for Macintosh and Windows platforms (we hope they add Linux soon). There are resources for students, teachers, members of the community, seniors looking for information on college applications, other schools -- the list goes on and on. All we can say is, check it out for yourself. And congratulations to the Pittsford-Sutherland High School website, for being one of the most comprehensive sites we've ever seen, and the CEARCH Star School of the Month for December, 1998.

Who are the people behind this site?

The Pittsford-Sutherland High School site is maintained by Paul Pavone, Richard Cote and David Selby.