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Photo by Lesley Murrihy

Easy access to information @Amesbury School

Lesley Murrihy —

Our new website is a full communication package that contains static and changing information and allows you to access information the way you want. This brief explanation about the ways you might use it will help you. Please do read.

The Home page of the website is a one stop shop for parents. On the Home page you will find all notices, news and events and the school calendar. These few features should contain all the day-to-day information that would normally be in a school newsletter. If you don't like the daily barrage of alerts and  information, then you can check out the Home page at your leisure, but we suggest you do so on a regular basis - probably weekly. This way you will remain up-to-date with what is happening at the school in a timely fashion. We will not be emailing all notices and events out as well. 

Information that changes (such as notices and news) will still be tweeted out and posted on Facebook, and the BLOG as they are put up on the website. You may choose to sign up and receive all updates and articles in one of these ways so that you have information as it becomes available instead of having to go on the website when you are able to. 

An Amesbury Digest will be sent out fortnightly. This brings all the communications since the publication of the last digest into one  publication with an editorial comment. This is great if you really have lost track of what is happening and want to catch up in one sitting. It is also useful for sending to relatives who might want to keep up-to-date with the school news of their grandchild or niece. Initially we will send an alert via Mail Chimp or ETap when this comes out. However, this will not be long term. If you want to automatically receive the Amesbury Digest when it comes out, please Subscribe at the bottom of the Home page of the website. Relatives and friends can subscribe also and they will automatically receive it when it is published each fortnight.

Occasionally there may be notices or articles that we want parents to receive but don't necessarily want to put into such public forums, these will emailed directly through Mail Chimp or eTAP.  

For any urgent messages (ones that cannot wait until the next Digest is due out), an alert and link to the article will be sent out via email. However, just to be very clear - other than in the case of these "urgent" communications, it will be assumed that you check the Home page of the website for notices and news regularly.

Please keep reading - this next bit is useful. You may have read a notice sometime before and want to find it again quickly. For example, you may want to find a camp notice with the list of what students need to take and it was sent out weeks before, but they are leaving for camp tomorrow. There are a couple of ways you might be able to find what you are looking for other than scrolling back through all the Notices on the Home page. Firstly, there is a Search function at the top of the website. Try this. But, secondly, a sure fire way is to go to the Curriculum drop down menu where specifically tagged articles are published under particular tabs. Please note: ALL articles are published to the Home page either as Notices or News and Events, or Developing Educational Thinking (right at the bottom of the Home page) but some are also tagged either as 'Sports', 'Camps and Trips' or 'Arts and Culture'. In the Curriculum drop down menu, you will see tabs for these and you will find these articles at the bottom of each page. For example, in the camp example above, you would look at the 'Camps and Trips' page and then at the articles at the bottom of the page which will be specifically related to camps and trips. This should make it much easier to find that camp notice you are after. 

If you are particularly interested in sports or art and culture, you might use these tabs to access articles which you are specifically interested in.

One of the main points of this email, is to say that we will ensure that all information is on the website and available on the Home page, but it will largely be your responsibility to access it in the way that works best for you.