CMS Tools Help Build Web-Savvy Presence for Teachers

The Internet is the main vehicle of communication in today's society. Students spend enormous amounts of time on the web every day, and there is a real opportunity for education to use this to their advantage.

The current generation of students is naturally web-savvy and will not be satisfied with Web sites of mediocre quality and substand. Therein lays the challenge. Most web content management systems (CMS) and web tools available to teachers just don't have the ease of use or comprehensive functionality to allow non-technical educators to quickly create and manage effective Web sites with rich content with minimal time or effort. Some of the challenges are as follows:

• Every teacher needs to be able to work on their own Web sites, thus creating a need for a much more diverse set of users in terms of technical competency, interests and backgrounds.
• The functionality requirements to make a classroom site useful are much greater than the needs at the district or school level. Classroom sites need a greater feature set for educational content. This includes more Web 2.0 tools as well as complex multi-media functionality.
• Teachers need a lot of flexibility but at the same time it is important that there is consistency with the district's site--that the district's brand and image are maintained.
• Teachers have limited time. Therfore, it is even more important that the site management tools are intuitive and fun. otherwise, sites can quickly become outdated and stale, thus defeating its very purpose of keeping the primary audience, such as parents and students, engaged.
• Teachers need a starting point from which, in a matter of minutes, they can have a basic site that is attractive and useful. Without that, most teachers will not even get started, creating a situation within a district where only a smalle group of classrooms actually have and web content.

AllofE's SchoolEffects is a culmination of a decade of Research and Development. SchoolEffects is a vast and extensible platform with a very broad set of functionalist. Innovations, such as the panel-based edit-in-place function, focus on implementing Web 2.0 technology that empowers teachers to maintain engaging sights that become an extension of their classrooms. Here, teachers can post assignment and lesson plans, share videos, pocasts or albums, maintain blogs and create a variety of rich content such as slideshows and tabbed panels, or reconfigure layouts of pages intuitively and quickly.

To see the level of flexibility a CMS like SchoolEffects offers, click on the links below to see how teachers are taking advantage of this opportunity:

• Example Site 1
• Example Site 2
• Example Site 3
• Example Site 4

Or check it out at www.schooleffects.com