From the Principal

Welcome back

Welcome to the new school term. I hope that the holiday period provided students with ample time for rest, recreation, revision of term one and planning for term two, and that Easter was a time of joy with family and loved ones. Easter is a most significant time to contemplate and reflect on the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, which are at the core of our Christian faith.

New website and new newsletter format

You may have noticed some significant changes to the College’s website over the last few weeks. We are currently transitioning to a new website that will allow us to take advantage of the latest advances in website functionality. As well as providing a fresh and attractive new ‘window’ to the College, hopefully, users will find that the new website is easier to navigate. This change has provided us with the opportunity to review our website content. Some of the ‘old’ content that has been deemed currently relevant has been moved to the new website, and over time the rest of the content will be updated or removed, and there may be some additions. We aim to ensure the material is clear, concise, easily accessible and purposeful. The site is being pruned down from 70+ pages to a more succinct 30+ pages. We do not anticipate too much disruption to the website functionality during this transition period and hope you will bear with us as the change to a better website is made.

The purpose of our ‘old’ website page was to be both ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ looking. By ‘inward’, I mean that its function was to provide information for our school community members to access – to go into and find content. ‘Outward’ means to show aspects of our College to the outside community. An example could be parents of a prospective new student accessing the website to learn about the College to help them in their search for a school for their daughter/son. The new website will be primarily an ‘outward’ looking one. A ‘Parent Portal’ tab will be the only ‘inward’ looking access point. The structure of the new site will be very different to the current site with content being re-sorted and allocated according to the reading statistics of our current site to serve better those who use it. So, it may take a while for people to find things in the new version especially if they are expecting to see them as per the previous version.

For current members of our school community, all of the information you may need to access will be located through the ‘Parent Portal’ tab at the top right side of the new website. This portal will lead you to a new ‘landing-page’ that contains quick links to both Xuno’ and ‘CareMonkey’ as well as an intranet structure where parents will be able to access policies and forms, etc. that you would have to search for throughout our old website. Hopefully, this will make parent lives a little easier having everything in one place. There will also be 'quick links' on the home page to get to the most visited pages for current parents and (based on visit statistics) new parents.

The ‘go-live’ date was Wednesday, April 11. The new site will have the same URL: www.ignatius.vic.edu.au So, if you have this as a quick link in your browser you won’t notice any change (except for a different style website).

In regards to the newsletter, there will also be a significant change. The evolution of the newsletter over the last ten years has been:

1. Black & white typed and the printed version that was handed to students for delivery home;

1. 2. Reformatted colour typed text with pictures that were printed and given to students for delivery home;
2. 3. Colour version placed on the website in pdf format and an email alert was then sent to parents and no provision of or delivery of a hard copy; and

4. As of this newsletter – an entirely new electronic format.

The latest version is not like the previous digital newsletter that was read like the paper version by turning pages; the old version was indeed the paper version in an electronic form. The information will be compartmentalised and accessed by clicking on the boxes on the website homepage. Each box will lead you to a different article, and you can peruse the information available by viewing the box labels.

You will be able to access the newsletter from the website homepage by clicking on ‘Our school’ and then ‘Newsletter.’

I thank our Communications Officer, Mr Tony Berryman-Long for his work to coordinate the change to a new website and newsletter format. I hope our readers find this new means of sharing information about our College more effective and efficient. Your feedback is welcomed. Please email info@ignatius.vic.edu.au with the title ‘New website’ or Newsletter.’

I wish our students and their families a productive and rewarding second term.

Mr Michael Exton Principal