If you’ve ever gone to the Harvard schools website and gotten conflicting or out-of-date information, then the site’s recent changes will come as good news. Over the summer, the district switched to a new vendor called Sharp School to overhaul the online face it presents to staff, parents, and students. In addition to providing the psharvard.org website with a fresh new look, Sharp School offers an easy-to-update system that ensures a customizable, streamlined look for all three portals of the district’s website.
“We were noticing things were out of date on the old web page. The elementary page looked different from the high school page, which looked different from the district page,” Superintendent Linda Dwight said in an interview last week. “Now it is easy for the site managers, principals, and administrative assistants to make real-time changes with a more consistent look and easier access for parents.”
That easier access includes a mobile-device-friendly layout, which changes the template according to the type of mobile device the reader is using to view the page. “Sharp School makes the web page adaptable. That’s one of the reasons it appealed to us,” said Dwight.
Another benefit to Sharp School is that it offers teachers a template for building classroom web pages; and existing blogs, web pages, and Google sites can easily be connected to the staff directory. Throughout the year, training will be offered to teachers on how to use the template, though having a classroom web page is not required.
While much of the content on the district’s web page is not new, it may still take parents a few extra minutes at the start of the year to familiarize themselves with the new look. Though these kinds of formatting changes can cause initial confusion, the aim of the new system is to reduce redundancy and improve communication.
Consistency and ease of use
The hallmark of these communication improvements is interconnected platforms that are able to talk to one another. Website users will notice a link to PowerSchool, a student management system new to the district, which is intended to replace Edline in the early part of this school year. PowerSchool will be used consistently by all grades and will contain contact information for students, attendance records, grades, and other demographic data, as well as the phone system used to notify families for snow days and school emergencies. In the past, the emergency phone system was operated independently by yet another platform, and so in some cases, updated contact information put into Edline wouldn’t get manually entered into the separate emergency notification system fast enough, causing confusion and frustration. Now all this data will be maintained in one central location that can be updated comprehensively, saving time.
The district is also using communication tools like Twitter to reach families with important announcements. On the new web page, users will notice links to the district’s three different Twitter feeds, @drlindadwight, @hildrethharvard, and @bromfieldschool, and it will be easy to use the embedded links to follow the school for fast, up-to-date information in that format.
“One of the goals I had was to build consistency and ease of use into our communications,” said Dwight. “Technology and communication are part of our strategic plan, and we were pretty deliberate about these changes.”
As with any new system, there may be some kinks to work out. Dwight asks the site’s users to report anything that is unclear or out of date.
“All these changes are works in progress,” said Dwight. “If parents have any difficulty finding information or have recommendations, they can address those to us. Especially since it is a changeable template and we want it to be very user friendly, sometimes we don’t even know where the places of confusion are, so parents’ notifying us about that would be helpful.”
Suggestions for improvement can be submitted to the elementary or high school principals, the district superintendent, or Martha Brooks, the website manager, who works at the high school.
