What are some key areas to focus on in an effort to enhance a schools’ virtual presence?

Reflection based on Objective 1.2 (Leardership in Technology/ MEd International Education with an Emphasis in Educational Technology)

"Students will complete a constructive critique of their current international schools’ virtual presence on the web, social media and online publications and share what strength and weakness the schools virtual presence has."

What are some key areas to focus on in an effort to enhance your school schools’ virtual presence?

A strength: a well-designed very visual dynamic website.

My school's presence on the web, social media and online publications.... exists! (And that is already an achievement). A list of mediums include a very well designed visual dynamic website. Accounts in several social networks (facebook, twitter and google+ being the most followed) and several online publications. All of these are constantly being changed. New information and pictures are being added, and that is another importan achievement, as information needs to be updated or otherwise becomes obsolete.

A strength: presence in the social networks such as Facebook.

Being a private school most of the information available was directed to advertise the school to prospect clients and this is, in my opinion, a weakness, and an area we should focus on. As a school we need to find ways of sharing information (checklists, grades, reports, events, etc). We have made much progress in this area. Many teachers complained about an overload of information* and this resulted in the creation of an intranet based in the use of google applications (docs/drive and calendar mainly) in November 2012 (previous directory attempt in April 2012). That way we can now share easily information about events and documents.   

A strength: online videos showing some of the student's preferred activities.

A weakness: different internal databases.

However, this intranet lacks of a solid structure as it has to bee used in combination with other software/intranets (PowerSchool for grades and reports and MagicMountain for Student Life (events, infractions, check-in lists, etc.) purposes mainly). It has been discussed in several staff meetings that the inconsistency of our different systems of information channels and databases is making more difficult the internal communication and it difficults staff training on the use of technology. 

A weakness: different internal databases.

It was also observed that both MagicMountain and Powerschool required launching/downloading software as well as databases, making the process painfully slow. Both of these applications might have been very useful in the past to fulfil part of our needs, but there are solutions which are cheaper, faster and more efficient.

A weakness: different internal databases.

An effort to improve: a starting point for an intranet.

I have personally designed an intranet to merge all of these applications in one single address and even provided details of a project with costs well under the budget of my school. My objectives (improving students' learning and teacher's support) did not quite match the school's (Marketing, Accounts, Business Plans...).** 

This project is now open to any school. Please forward this blog's address to whom you think it might concern. 
The project consists in the creation of an intranet programmed in PHP and using MySQL databases. A PHP generated intranet using MySQL databases could be very useful to any school. No software or databases need to be downloaded as the duo PHP/MySQL is cloud-based.
A friendly graphic interface can make this intranet very easy to use. Teachers, students, parents and other users can have access to a personalized portal once they login this intranet with their username and password (which can be the same as used to login the school's LAN, if available). All google applications (Calendar, docs, email, etc) can easily be integrated in this site.
This intranet would be able to execute efficiently any task currently executed by the different systems in use: MagicMountain, PowerSchool or Power Teacher Gradebook or equivalent packages. These include bulletins, grades, comments, check lists, database queries/printouts, etc. It would also be able to execute tasks which none of the other systems in use can execute. For example check-in reminders for students or an online live schedule. This can be done with a high level of security from any (previously accepted) machine with internet access. 

The cost is very low, compared with the costs of maintaining old-fashioned packages.  A first investment of around  twenty thousand Euros, depending on individual school's needs. A tailor-made intranet can be adapted to fit ANY school's needs and it can be operational in three monthw (a previous testing (Beta/sandbox version) can be available much earlier. 


I believe that such a useful, reliable, easy to use intranet could also be shown partially (some data protected) to outsiders, who would then see how well the school works inside and want to become part of it. 

Please note that a PHP/MySQL dynamic intranet can easily handle the number of users of a school's intranet (say, one thousand) and its frequency of use (several times a day). Facebook works with PHP dynamic pages feeding from MySQL databases!

Alvaro Serra

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* See Reflections based on the video* ¨It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure.¨
http://leadership-technology.blogspot.ch/2013/01/reflections-based-on-video-its-not.html

** See article "Why is having a clearly defined "Why" narrative so important to the success of an IT Department?"

http://leadership-technology.blogspot.ch/2013/01/the-why-of-why.html