Natomas Charter School

Web 2.0 Community Website

Natomas Charter School is focused on creating the leaders of tomorrow.  They wanted a website that reflects the leading edge in technology and support the community of students, teachers and parents. The school also wanted to explore how technology could be used for engaging the students, providing better educational experience and better communication with the parents. And this had to be done in a cost effective manner.

SymSoft analyzed the school’s needs and proposed improving the school’s website with a new and engaging visual design, using a popular open-source Content Management System(CMS), Drupal. We created a community website complete with Web 2.0 features including forums for students, parents and teachers, blogs, student showcase, event calendar, home work calendar, sports calendar and support for uploading photos and daily video broadcasts. With the easy to use interface, the school administrative staff and teachers are able to provide latest information to the students and parents. The website has improved the communication by providing RSS feeds for important announcements, subscriptions for newsletters and daily updates for the events and homework assignments. With this electronic delivery of the information, the school is achieving cost savings.

The school is now using the community features in creative ways to promote collaboration and enhance problem solving capabilities in the students. We are also working with the school to explore and use the podcasting capabilities.

Services Provided:

Information architecture, Visual Design, Graphics Design, CMS Analysis, Drupal CMS website, Drupal theme creation, Web hosting and technical support.

Technologies:

Drupal, PHP, MySql, XHTML, CSS, JQuery, AJAX, Flash