Using Your Webpage as your Newspaper

It doesn’t matter the size of a school, there is always something going on.  Whether it’s a school play, a teacher winning an award or the results of a science fair, it’s information that you want to share.

There are many ways to decimate that information (and I’ll go into most of them individually later on), but your website is the place to start. Think of it this way, your website is the capitol of your information network. All things come and go through it. Every communication should always lead readers back to your website.

As I talked about last week, our website is built on a WordPress platform, which makes it easy to update our content.  We have a lot of activity for a school system of roughly 140 students. There are events, school board meetings and parents’ events that we wish to push out to our community.

The list category feature allows us to differentiate what will be posted on the front page and if it will be posted on any other pages. For example, around the 15th of every month, we publish the school lunch menu and order form. When the post is created, I label it as a “News” item and a “lunch” item. Once it is published, it will be the first thing on our news feed and the top post on the Lunch page. Suppose that a few weeks later, a parent wants to know what will be on the menu for a particular day. Instead of searching through all of the news items (which the lunch menu wouldn’t be on the front page anymore), that parent could just go to the lunch page. In a traditional webpage setting, this post would have been created twice. With WordPress, all it takes is one click of a mouse to make the lunch menu appear twice.

Our website is basically our newspaper. We have had as many as 15 items posted in a week’s time. Our hope is that the website will not only inform our families about the latest happenings at Lionsgate, we hope to build a sense of community and openness.

 

November 30, 2011 | | No Comments »

How Far Tech at Lionsgate Has Come

I started working at Lionsgate Academy half-way through their first year.  At the time Lionsgate didn’t have a student information system (now we use TIES), it was running it’s own Exchange server and it had two separate networks (physically) one for staff and one for student.  At the time the set-up worked great.  The student network and laptop system was cutting edge in my opinion… but it wasn’t scalable enough (or at least I didn’t have the ability/time to scale it as it was) for a rapidly growing school.There were about fifty students that year, five classrooms and two mobile labs.  If I’m remembering correctly there were about 40 lenovo t-42s (refurbished–nice laptops) and a handful of small desktop dell computers.   The two mobile labs had 10 laptops on each of them and the other laptops went to staff.  The student wireless network covered the small footprint of the school with 3 or 4 access points and the students all had roaming profiles.  It was cool.

The limited access points and the roaming profiles, coupled with relatively slow, although sturdy laptops started to really become a problem by the end of the year as staff got more comfortable using the computers with students and more and more data was going into their accounts.  It became clear that the roaming profiles would have to go.  That sped things up significantly and we invested in more T-42s over the next two years as we grew.

Fast forward to today (this is Lionsgate’s fourth season) and a student population of 140, a staff of 120 (roughly) and a second site for our AIM program in an adjacent apartment building that we’re sending our network too.  Despite that, a lot of things look the same.  We still maintain mobile computer labs while some classrooms have dedicated sets of laptops.  We still use Lenovos although they’re brand new and on a three year lease which includes Lenovo’s spectacular customer service.  We have a solid Aruba wireless network thanks to some wonderful help from Data Media Solutions, a vendor that has been great for us.  Lionsgate’s rapid growth will slow considerably now as we’ve filled our facility and I’m excited to work with what we have and focus less on growing.  Our staff is savvy and has a lot of good ideas for implementing and improving our systems in the classroom.  I expect the next few years of tech at Lionsgate to focus on communication technologies between staff and students and parents.  I also expect that communication will what drives successful schools everywhere.  Buying computers is easy, using them well is an art.

November 25, 2011 | | No Comments »

WordPress as a School Website Solution

When I arrived at Lionsgate Academy in July 2010, the school was about to overhaul the website. The previous site was difficult to update. It required special knowledge of HTML and CSS. Anytime LGA had a new job opportunity or an agenda for an upcoming School Board meeting, the school had to outsource simple updates.

When asked how we could improve this process, only one word came out of my mouth.

WordPress (yes…technically it’s one word).

Some may look at this and think that WordPress is nothing more than a glorified blog platform that is limited in its application. They may assert that it’s not a professional protocol to create a website. WordPress is used on many professional websites, such as local and national news sites. Odds are that you visit WordPress sites every day. You probably didn’t notice it.

Websites have two distinct components, design and content. WordPress makes it so that you don’t need special knowledge to maintain a website. Creating content doesn’t require hours of coding or cutting and pasting from one page to another. Anyone can create their own content.

Websites are about content. Why complicate it?

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share some of the things that we have improved about our website that has been made possible by WordPress.

November 23, 2011 | | No Comments »

Data Privacy and Communication

One of the challenges we face at Lionsgate is data privacy. This means ensuring that any information that is shared with staff is on a “need to know basis” and can be accessed through the proper channels. Here we believe that communication is key. In order for our staff to communicate to each other wirelessly we use a system of radio units manufactured by Motorola. These particular model we use is the DTR 650. The DTR 650 uses an encrypted radio signal sent from the transmitting radio and the message is then decrypted by the receiving unit. In order to ensure that our staff is able to provide a productive work environment; the staff that are provided with these radio units are divided into sub-groups.
These groups range from Support Services to Behavior Team. The latter uses the radio system as an integral artery to their communication. The information that they convey over the radios is sensitive and confidential. It is imperative that their dialogue is not to be heard by anyone outside of the intended listeners group. The DTR 650’s allow our staff to communicate with just one user or a group of users at any given time. This gives us the ability to relay information without the concern of revealing any sensitive information.
November 8, 2011 | | No Comments »

Two Years of Google Apps

About two years ago Lionsgate switched from a Miicrosoft Exchange/Outlook system to Google Apps.  At the time I had been testing Google Apps and had prepared a test environment to implement over the following summer, so I didn’t intend for the change to happen when it did.  The reason for the sudden switch was a problem with my exchange server.  It looked like something that could have been fixed but wasn’t going to happen quickly. I worked with administration and proceeded tell the team (about 60 people at the time) that we were moving to google that evening.Despite the unexpected and sudden switch over the staff at Lionsgate handled it very well.  One of the necessary qualities for succeeding with our population of students is flexibility and this staff demonstrated remarkable flexibility at the time.  I don’t think I received a single complaint.

It didn’t take long for the staff to start using the collaborative features of docs and become very good at working with calendars.  Communication of data is key to the success of Lionsgate.  Everyone participates in data tracking and implementing procedures.  Shared documents provide a great structure for the staff to organically develop methods that fit their particular needs and the needs of the students they serve.

Initially I had foreseen our organization dropping Microsoft Office for Google Docs all together and possibly even going to cloud storage (through Google) to replace our network (shared) folders.  It’s clear to me now that without a serious paradigm shift in the way people work on documents and interact with them, we will maintain a Windows file server and continue to rely on and support Microsoft Office products.

Google Apps, although very useful and good for our organization, is not Microsoft Office. Google Docs cannot replace traditional shared drives for ease of use and management.

Oscar Prill
Technology Coordinator
oprill@lgamn.org  

November 7, 2011 | | No Comments »