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Hello,

I would like to introduce myself. My name is Julie and I work as the Technology Coordinator at Annunciation School. I have attended a few workshops and have probably met some of you.

Our school is starting to research school management systems and I was wondering if your school has one and what it is.  What do you like about it and what don’t you like.

Currently we have our own website that is managed by a volunteer (we post a lot of information for parents here), teacher webpage’s and a grade portal for our middle school. We would like to incorporate the school information into one system where parents have a login so that we can use our website more for marketing purposes. I attended a workshop at the NCEA conference that was put on by SchoolsSpeak. They seem to incorporate a lot of what we are looking for in one package but I’m sure there are a lot of other programs available.

Thank you for taking the time to get back to me.

Julie
Technology Coordinator
Annunciation School

But like many of you, I am now back to work full-force and itching to get blogging again! I have yet to fix my form-mailer to collect data from the archdiocese tech coordinators, but I am hoping that while I was “out” some new plug-ins came “in” and that will help that form to be up and running very soon.

What’s Ahead
The big scurry this fall for most of us is getting ready for Learnia, Harcourt’s answer to standardized testing online. Blessed Trinity was part of the pilot program last year, and apparently we were one of the few schools for whom the testing went well. I hope this can be a forum for some of us to share ideas about what works and what doesn’t, and how to prepare your network, teachers and students for the testing.

I’m finally starting to get caught up after installing some new (refurb) PCs that came in during workshop week!

Another issue for me this year will be researching, encouraging, and attempting to find funding for a Student Information System. Many on our staff (including I) have spent many hours dealing with data issues in the last four weeks. It seems we duplicate our work three or four times these days for all the different changes that come about, which is quite a bit of time when students are still registering on the first day of school! I hope we can reduce that workload with an integrated system soon. I will be looking to my colleagues for advice!