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Introduction
Over the past few years, as part of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) reform on the one hand, and the increased demands for school accountability on the other, more and more schools have launched a school website aimed at enhancing educational activities, supporting student-teacher communication, contributing to school marketing efforts, and fostering accountability to and collaboration with the school's constituency (Hesketh & Selwyn, 1999; Maddux & Johnson, 2006; Miodusar, Nachmias, Tubin, & Forkosh-Baruch, 2003). A large body of research on ICT-based pedagogical and educational websites (i.e., websites that focus on subject matters and learning activities) reveals the contributions of such websites to the schooling process (Kozma, 2003; Miodusar, Nachmias, Lahav, & Oren, 2000; Pelgrum & Anderson, 2001; Plomp, Anderson, Law, & Quale, 2003). However, the phenomenon of school websites, which serve the school organization in its entirety, remains relatively unexplored. Buzzwords like "E-learning," "E-teaching," and "E-schooling" have become very popular but provide no help in generating a deeper understanding of school website contents, structure, and functions.
The vagueness of school website goals is also evidenced in the metaphors used to refer to them in the educational literature: a window for the school's culture (Giladi, 2004); a virtual display window (Klein, 2005); like Hollywood movie sets with large graphics but not much solid content (McKenzie, 1997); or a tool through which schools seek to reaffirm or reconstruct their institutional identities (Hesketh & Selwyn, 1999). All these metaphors indicate the power of the potential messages school websites can convey to casual and intentional visitors, but what is actually happening on school websites?
The present study aims to start answering this question by exploring the contents and structure of school websites and their responsiveness to their school's environment. In the following sections we briefly review the literature regarding school websites, describe the institutional theory that provides the conceptual framework for the study, present the study methods and findings, and finally discuss the results and suggest practical implications for accountability-oriented school website development.
Literature Review
School Websites
Schools' access to the Internet has increased dramatically over recent years. In the USA for example, the proportion of instructional rooms with access to the Internet increased from 51% in 1998 to 93% in 2003 (NCES, 2005). It follows...