Shore School, Website

Brief

Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) wanted a website to facilitate timely dissemination of information to its community members. The website layout had to be functional and easy to use but also allow for the inclusion of images to emphasise certain news articles. To expedite the flow of information the site had to support the delegation of editing rights to authorised staff.

In addition to selecting Alaress as their website partner, Shore were also in the market for a learning management system (LMS). Shore was ready to engage their entire school's community online and were keen to take on our LMS product called Schoolbox™.

Prior to implementing Schoolbox a hierarchical structure of network folders was used to distribute information. While this method was simple to use it was difficult to locate information in a timely way. Prior experience with an Open Source system wasn't positive as it was difficult for staff to use. The challenge was to implement an information sharing system that didn't get in the way of adoption.

Solution

Alaress commenced this project consulting with the school to ensure the optimum solution was well scoped, proposed and delivered. We commenced design and development of a customised deployment of Schoolbox which we assisted the school in branding internally as “Lampada”. Lampada was integrated into both the website for easy access internally and remotely. Lampada was also integrated with other management and accounting platforms.

Schoolbox was chosen for three primary reasons. Firstly, even though Schoolbox has many capabilities the system is easy to use. Teachers can build a simple class page that contains reference information in minutes or they can invest more time to embed multimedia modules and collaboration features (such as forums).

Secondly, Schoolbox connects to the Student Administration system in real time, meaning that the class, student and teacher information is always up to date. Finally, there is very little ongoing administration needed, meaning that ICT staff can focus on managing the adoption of the system instead of managing and configuring it.

The Alaress design team completed the concepts for the new public website adhering to the strict guidelines and requirements to produce a clean and elegant interface that would act to foster the school community. The new website was built on Alaress' A'Presto content management system and coded using modern standards such as XHTML and CSS.

Results

The content management system enabled the school to delegate content management responsibilities to various school departments and empower them to control the updates for their respective areas on the new website.

Shore School's ICT Manager Richard Jones said:

Shore replaced an existing Intranet with Schoolbox at the beginning of Term 3 2009. Schoolbox was selected because it is easy to use, has a powerful content management system and is supported by a company that shares our passion for education. The implementation went very smoothly with no major issues experienced since the launch. Schoolbox is a flexible product that has been adapted to the specific needs of Shore. The willingness of Alaress to make such changes has been a major contributor to the acceptance of the system.

Tweet