Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Tuesday, August 22, 2006
La Crosse schools get Web upgrade; assignments and grades may soon go online
Reminder e-mails an hour before your kids’ games and concerts. Online links to grades and assignments. A Web posting of those two magic words: “snow day.”
All may be possible via a new Web site for the La Crosse School District that went online Thursday. It replaces the district’s former site, which had been up for about a decade.
A Winona, Minn.-based Web hosting company, rSchool Today, is a partner with the district on the project.
The site, full of eye-grabbing color photos of district students, aims to connect the community more quickly to useful school information and allow staff to enhance lessons with online learning links, said Kathy Tyser, associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction.
“Our main goal was to make our site much more user-friendly,” Tyser said.
Superintendent Jerry Kember agreed, but also said the site offered the district “another wonderful marketing tool.” He told the La Crosse School Board at its meeting Monday that families moving to the area often say they got most of their school information through the Web.
The new site allows parents to sign up for accounts that can be personalized to, for example, show a schedule of their kids’ extracurricular activities.
Kember also showed the board a couple of individual school Web sites, all linked to from the district’s main Web page. Teachers can set up their own pages that can be accessed by students and parents.
Unlike the district’s former Web site, this one has the same look and format for each school.
The project cost more than $40,000 in start-up fees, Tyser said, and was paid “piece-meal” from a number of department budgets, plus the district’s community service fund. The contract with rSchoolToday is “pay as we go,” she said.
Additional features such as online grades and online forms for field trips are being added through a system called Skyward, Tyser said, and could be available in October or November.
Tyser stressed school information still will be spread through traditional means.
“I want to be sensitive to families without computers, and make sure they understand they shouldn’t feel like lesser citizens,” she said.
check it out
www.lacrosseschools.com
Dan Simmons can be reached at (608) 791-8217 or dsimmons@lacrossetribune.com.
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