Questions about SchoolCenter school web management tool

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Permalink Reply by John Patota on March 25, 2009 at 6:13pm

Keep us up-to-date.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Nielsen on December 9, 2009 at 9:58am

Apologies for bumping an old thread, but I realized it was about a year since I posted this and wanted to revisit some of my concerns from last year:

- The WYSIWYG editor (the "Advanced Content Editor") is more reliable than I remember, and has been integrated much better into the entire setup. It's much easier to use, you no longer have to deal with multiple windows, waiting for one window to load before clicking something in another, multiple save buttons, etc.
- Links now properly inherit the font size of the HTML block they are within.
- There is now capability to add JavaScript and Flash, and you can restrict that ability to specific users or groups of users.
- There is now the ability to add a Google Analytics code at the admin level. (I'm not sure how SchoolCenter will handle the recently announced updates to how the GA code is written and added).
- The User Access List is fast enough to use, and there is a new Report Generator admin tool that gives access to much of this data in aggregate (I dabbled with it a little early on and was impressed by the capability but had trouble getting it to output what I thought it should be outputting).
- I can't recall any problems with minor updates.
- Can now add your own CSS, if you'd like to build consistent styles across the site that way.

The only things that still lingers are some less frequent usability weaknesses. We still have people every week or two (more frequently at the beginning and end of year) who delete an entire Document Manager page when they mean to delete a single Document because the deletion process and visual layout implies one and does the other. The Blog page still calls each new post a "blog", so you write blogs (posts) on a blog (board) on a blog (type of page). It would be nice to be able to turn off some of the new features; for example, I know that, for now, we aren't going to use SchoolCenter for scheduling rooms or parent-teacher conferences, so I'd like to keep those tools hidden so they don't cause confusion. In general, though, all of our staff seem to be getting along pretty well now.

It really does seem like SchoolCenter web tools has turned a good corner in the last year, and there's definitely been more improvement than I saw in the two years before that. They've got an official Twitter account (@SchoolCenterPro), too, so now they can internet stalk any comments I make there, too. ;)

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Permalink Reply by John Patota on February 4, 2009 at 10:25am

I thought it was just us having these types of issues with SchoolCenter. We are having the same sort of problems that Dave Nielsen reperted on in the last post.

Bottom line, look at a few before deciding.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Webb on March 25, 2009 at 8:18pm

We have used SchoolCenter for the past 6+ years. Overall, we have been very pleased with it. We have teachers posting assignments, content, documents and videos on their classroom webpages. We have been using it to "supply" students and parents with online grades information through an export from our Easy Grade Pro and an import function right to SchoolCenter. One feature we'd like to see added very soon is the ability for teachers to embed other web 2.0 items such as student-created Glogs into SchoolCenter pages.

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Permalink Reply by Suzanne on February 13, 2010 at 2:49pm

We have been using SchoolCenter for the past 6 years. Click on the link below to view the "Hot Potato' sample quizzes and to see embedded google docs and even a google form.

http://www.lacklandisd.net/education/dept/dept.php?sectionid=638&

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