While the phrase “school portal” may sound as dated as “information superhighway” or even “Don’t copy that floppy,” in fact the idea is finally becoming an effective solution for schools. Many districts and states now are taking Web sites to the next level by developing portals that have customized content for teachers, students, and parents. The vision: engage students with Facebook-like tools, help teachers with enriched curriculum resources, and enlist parents as partners with real-time data on their children’s academic progress.
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Accessible by user name and password, school portals typically give students and parents access to assignments and grades, and sometimes standardized-test scores. They also usually include a class calendar, discussion forums, and personal Facebook-like student pages.
That’s just for starters. The latest portal buzzwords, according to Kevin McGuire, technology director for Michigan City, Indiana, schools and a former state tech director of the year, are personal learning plans, social networking, and portable student portfolios, which children can take with them when they leave.
“It’s all about communication,” McGuire says. “Too often, parents wait too long [to contact the school] and can’t believe that their children won’t be graduating. We realized that nine-week report cards aren’t frequent enough. And we want to give parents access to the information to help the students succeed.” Michigan City’s portal, which has been in the works for a number of years, already gives parents and teachers access to standardized-test scores, grades, attendance, and discipline records; students will receive access to all the data in the fall.
An unusual feature of the portal is the personal learning plan, in which individual students set their own goals for the year and work with their teachers on their progress during that year. “PLPs are a way for us to know how students feel about learning,” McGuire says. “And we’re starting to use them to help students stay on the path.” Begun in a few middle schools and used in an after-school remedial program, PLPs will ultimately be rolled out K–12, system-wide, and students will update their plans every year.
A second component of Michigan City’s portal is the individual student portfolio, a multimedia repository that colleges are increasingly requiring for admission. Currently visible only to the student creators, these portable portfolios should be accessible for public display by the fall, McGuire says.
The final component of the district’s plan is secure social networking, which is intended to enable students to email one another and ask their teachers for help in a safe environment that can be managed and monitored by the district. The networking piece and other fine-tuning should be completed next spring, according to McGuire, who adds that the portal was built on Drupal, an opensource content-management application, and was not a costly project.
Meanwhile, the Corpus Christi (Texas) ISD rolled out a school portal running on a customized version of eChalk software districtwide in 2008. As with Michigan City, a key Corpus Christi goal is improving communication and keeping parents informed about their children’s progress, according to Lyndall Gathright, the district Webmaster. The portal recently began allowing parents to see what the teacher assigns, the due date, and a student’s grade for the assignment as soon as they are posted. Any parent with Internet access can get an up-to-date status report on homework at any time and is thus empowered to help their children with current assignments or prod them on overdue ones.
In a recent study of portal usage, Corpus Christi was encouraged to find that 75 percent of its teachers had implemented all 12 features the district recommended for driving traffic to their class pages. The study also found that 98 percent of all teachers are using the portal and that 79 percent of all K–12 students are registered users. In addition, students sent an average of three emails apiece via the portal, and the volume was much higher in the upper grades.
Although there is no quantifiable evidence that the portal has improved learning, Gathright says, parents and teachers feel that it fosters a partnership between parents and students concerning school and that it encourages responsibility. Corpus Christi is looking for ways to expand Web 2.0 functions like networking and blogging throughout more schools in the district and to encourage learning 24/7, inside and outside the classroom.
[keep reading at techlearning.com]