WWW Publishing Guidelines for Students and Staff

The following guidelines apply specifically to publicly accessible resources hosted on GUHSD web servers. Instructors should apply their own standards to unpublished work completed in web format to satisfy classroom assignments.

Existing policies governing other media resources as approved by the Library Council and the Governing Board apply equally to web page content.

Because our audience is global and not restricted to one age group, gender, ethnicity, religion, creed, heritage, or geographic location, we must take care to communicate clearly, explaining any information which may be unfamiliar to some or which could be misconstrued. Communicate in a thoughtful and responsible manner with regard for the sensibilities of others.

Only district employees may directly upload material to district hosted web pages. Students, parent volunteers and other non-employees must submit all work to an authorized web account holder for posting unless otherwise authorized by the school principal. Principals should make such authorizations upon condition of an agreement with a district employee to monitor said content and alert the principal immediately of any incorrect content.

I Content

The content of all electronically delivered materials must be consistent with the educational goals of the Grossmont Union High School District. Student-produced web content constructed as classroom exercises should be restricted to the classroom and not placed on district servers accessible by the public. Teachers requesting the activation of a student's eBacpack web site assume responsibility for reviewing and monitoring content.

District equipment and systems may not be used to promote or offer services or products for profit. Sponsorships and business partnerships in the context of School to Careers or Vocational Education programs may be appropriately acknowledged on district hosted pages.

Photographs or video of identifiable minors shall not appear on GUHSD-hosted pages without written parent permission. Not withstanding contact information and right-know data guaranteed by NCLB, etc., employees shall not be compelled to display their photograph or any information that does not pertain directly to their job description.

Addresses and phone numbers of minors may not appear in publicly accessible GUHSD web resources. This also includes email addresses unless the account is non-district hosted and the parent gives written authorization .

Presentations hosted by the district must support the educational goals of district sanctioned programs. Parents have the reasonable expectation that student activities at school are supervised by district personnel and that those staff members offer guidance and support for students.

No copyrighted text, image, video or sound file may be used in whole or part without the written consent and citation of the copyright holder. The absence of the copyright © symbol does not mean the image is in the public domain. When in doubt, leave it out. Teachers must obtain student and parent permission before publishing student-created art or literature to publicly accessible pages. This is covered in greater detail in the Network Ethics Unit

Quoted material must include a citation of the source.

Online student forums, blogs, wikis or chat areas are prohibited except where moderated by an instructor as part of the curriculum.

Only ASB sanctioned clubs and intramural groups may have web pages hosted on district web servers. Advisors are responsible for reviewing and approving content before it goes online. The official staff advisor's name shall appear on all club or intramural group pages as the employee contact.

School newspapers may not charge advertisers a premium to include their advertisement in any online version of the school newspaper.

The Grossmont Union High School District is the owner of all pages hosted on its web servers. No other personal copyrights may appear other than those identifying copyrighted images or software used and/or distributed with permission.

Only pages created by students or employees of the Grossmont Union High School District may be hosted on District web servers. Exceptions for educational affiliates such as feeder districts must be approved by the Superintendent or his designee.

Links to external URL's should be clearly identified as such and name the source. No link shall be included that is not uniformly accessible to all students and employees of the District and must conform to the same content standards as other district media.

Distributing plugins, helper applications, freeware, shareware or licensed software from publicly accessible pages is prohibited. For internal GUHSD use, you must have prior authorization.

Materials in violation of law or District policy will be removed without notice. Account holders who fail to take reasonable steps to maintain the security of their access or place undue burden on district computer systems will lose their account privileges.



II Technical

Assign ALT text to all images in order to provide improved access to the sight- impaired and those using assistive technologies.

Give web pages a brief but specific descriptive title within the title section of the HTML head.

Do not include spaces or punctuation marks in file or folder names, e.g., / & $ % . ?. HTML files should end with the .html or .htm file suffix. Images should include the appropriate file suffix.

Avoid dead-end links. Leave under-construction features "cold" on your lists.

Provide a text bail-out link for those that don't want to sit through Flash movies or don't have the plugin. Under no circumstances should required site content and links be dependent upon Flash or any other plug-in media.

Frames, animated GIF's, audio files, video or bandwidth intensive resources should be well-planned and not used gratuitously.

Large bodies of text should be indexed and/or broken up into linked documents.

Links back to home pages should be included on all subordinate pages or “close window” functionality if a new browser window has been created.

Use JPEG format for photos and GIF for line art and illustrations. Use appropriate software tools and utilities for reducing image file size. Control image dimensions in your image editing software, not your web authoring program.

Test pages in multiple browser/operating systems before publishing

Text and link colors should be in contrast to the background color or pattern.

Do not depend on I&TS to keep back ups of your site's work. Always keep a local archive of your program's or campus' files.

Include a creation/revision date in all presentations.

Proof-read for spelling, punctuation and grammar before publishing.

revised 4/05