Complete with new navigational tools, the availability of new documents and forms uploaded from various departments, and new sections for the staff, the WW-P school district’s website was revamped over the summer in time for the beginning of school.##M:[more]##
According to district spokeswoman Gerri Hutner, the idea was “to create a better navigational system for easier access, as well as to work toward the goal of having as much information as possible.”
While the district will still be sending information home to parents, officials want to encourage everyone to use the district’s website as the primary place that students, parents, and staff will go for school-related information. In addition to making the website more user-friendly, Hutner says district officials are hoping parents will utilize the website when they need information, rather than having to pick up the telephone or head to the school.
In moving toward this goal, “the high school newsletters are no longer going to be mailed home,” says Hutner. “It will save mailing costs, and it will save paper. It’s a green way to have communications.”
Rick Cave, the district’s technology director, explains that visitors to the new website for the first time will see that the information is organized differently, and that information, such as school lunches, is “now all centralized to ensure continuity and consistency, which hadn’t been done in the past.”
Cave said officials are working with the teaching staff to train them how to use the system and develop web pages for themselves to expand use in those areas. “It’s going to provide more online resources,” he said, adding that in the future, officials hope to see blogs and podcasts. “You can essentially create private intranets that a class has access to, and they can share information among themselves,” he said. He said officials are aiming to have teachers begin using these features by next year.
“This year the plan was to essentially move the existing site over to this new system,” Cave added. “For the next year, it’s to get the teachers up to speed and running on it. We’ll also start to be able to work on the possibility to add auxiliary sites related to the district,” such as websites for the PTSA, he said.
The program the school districts is utilizing has a feature that allows students to actually have accounts, in which they would be able to log in and automatically be directed to teachers they would have. This is farther in the future, and probably won’t be available until the year after next, he said.
“This will be an evolving thing for years to come,” Cave said. “Similar to what we did with Infinite Campus, we will keep adding to it.”
Infinite Campus is the district’s new student information system, launched last fall. It is web-based so teachers and administrators can access information from anywhere at any time. It also serves as a district-wide data warehouse, allowing student data to be entered once and leveraged across the entire district.
There is a wide range of features to the new system, but for now the goal is for the district to mimic what information it used in its old system, SASI, for scheduling and keeping student information. The new database also has the ability to allow school officials to analyze student test scores and assess how well their programs are doing.
Last fall parents were given access and were able to log into the new Infinite Campus student database through the campus portal feature and access their children’s demographic information, attendance and immunization records, and progress reports and report cards.
Last fall officials made demographic, immunization, and attendance information available for parents of students in all grade levels, but the report cards and progress reports were only available for those in grades 6 through 12. This was because grading is different for the earlier grade levels, and letter grades do not accurately reflect a child’s progress. Officials spent last year setting up the system to include the special channels and categories for the K-5 grading.
Now this year, all report cards for grades kindergarten through 12 are available. Also, “this year, there will be a new version of the campus portal,” allowing both parents and students to log into it. “The new version has more features. I think from the parents’ perspective, we’re working out things like getting out standardized test scores and things of that nature,” Cave said.
