The focus of McDonogh’s website, McDonogh.org, has always been on education. Yes, “DotOrg” provides information for prospective and current families, alumni, faculty, and staff, but more importantly DotOrg has provided McDonogh students with an opportunity to learn complex web technologies and apply their skills in a real-world atmosphere. McDonogh.org is built entirely, from the ground up, without any direct faculty intervention. A team of students have come together every year since 1999 to work on DotOrg.

In 1998, McDonogh contacted a consulting firm to build its first website. After months of meetings between administrators and the firm, the resulting website looked and felt much like the paper “viewbook” distributed by the admissions office to prospective families. It was large, clunky, and very difficult to maintain. Furthermore, it offered virtually no services or information for current students, faculty, and staff.

In the fall of 1999, recently-hired Director of Instructional Technology Tim Fish, along with several students, decided that they could do better. Under Fish’s tutelage, the first summer Web Team was formed. Dave Valeri ’00 and Jack Hardcastle ’02 worked full time on their first two projects, a Middle School system for reporting mid-term grades and a campus-wide calendar that would take on the complex task of scheduling all campus resources and displaying events to the McDonogh public. Both systems launched to overwhelming appeal that fall.

Surprisingly, neither project was at all what Fish had envisioned six months prior. The request for the interim reports system was initially just for a better way to sort the overwhelming paperwork generated each term. As for the calendar, it began life as a listing of parent technology training courses online. In both cases, the students took the initial project description, applied their own creativity and initiative, and the result was something more than either student or mentor had foreseen.

During the school year into 2000, Fish and his growing team of student programmers used the momentum of the first summer to dream ever loftier dreams. By January, it was decided that the entire viewbook website would be rewritten. The programmers would not make the same mistake twice, however, and it was decided that the new site would be one-hundred percent dynamic. Every word on every page would be pulled from a database, allowing even those with limited computer skills to update the website as needed. At the time, this was a revolutionary idea. No school, especially not one with an all-student web development team, had ever tried this.

By June of that year, five students had joined the team, including David Borowitz ’04, Chris Diffley ’02, and Neil Jhaveri ’03. By now, Fish was lessening his direct control over the whole process. “You have to check your ego at the door when you work with these kids. The work they are doing is beyond my skill level. I can’t keep up. You really have to trust the students, give them the tools they need to do the job, and get out of the way.”

Starting from scratch, the programmers worked with staff from Public Relations and Alumni Development to rewrite the entire site. Working well into the night on occasion, the team launched version 1.0 of McDonogh.Org on August 24th, 2000. The site has been running since then, constantly changing and constantly being updated and reworked.

Beginning in that same year, website design and construction was added to the curriculum in the Upper School. Students of all skill levels are taught how to create, from scratch, their very own websites using simple tools and complex ideas. In 2004, students in the advanced Computer Science course took it one step further, completing the circle with the first formal introduction of development on McDonogh.Org in a classroom setting. The students in that class built the McDonogh Reads program, used to track reading among Lower School students. For the first time too, students were working on projects that would be used to help educate other students.

More students have joined the team over the years, and a few have graduated on to bigger and better things. Jason Blight ’03 and Eugene Gerzhoy ’03 arrived in 2001, Maxwell Kruger ’05 in 2004, and Jennifer Newman ’05, the first female student to join the project, started in 2005. A separate team of writers and editors has consistently tweaked and shaped the content on the site, starting with Christopher Zirpoli ’00 and Colin Lidston ’01, being joined by Mike Rubin ’02, Greg Scruggs ’04, John Lingan ’03, Sam Jonas ’02, Michael Snyder ’06, Stephen Mulligan ’06, and Terrell Winder ’07.

In 2006, Jack Hardcastle joined the McDonogh faculty, becoming the school’s first full-time webmaster. He co-teaches the Web Design course with Tim Fish and consults with the advanced Computer Science course on web development. McDonogh remains committed to enabling our own gifted students, allowing them to learn through experience and trusting them with the future of our online presence. Please direct any questions regarding the construction or maintenance of the site to jwhardcastle@mcdonogh.org.