Web Content Management System Project

Seattle Public Schools is committed to increasing community engagement and meeting the information needs of our students, staff and families. One strategy we are using to meet these goals is to implement a new Web Content Management System (WCMS) for our website.

The WCMS platform provides online tools to increase family engagement and student learning and creates equitable access to these tools for all our schools. It will also increase our ability to provide accurate and timely information through web tools that are easier to use and require less time to maintain.

In these extremely difficult economic times it is essential for us to prioritize use of resources. Thanks to our community support for our students, levy funds were available for this priority project to improve communications with all our families.

This project is a district priority because improving stakeholder engagement is one of the key areas in the District's strategic plan, Excellence for All. A new website was identified as a powerful way to improve communication with our many audiences. A team of internal and external stakeholders have been working together over the last two years to plan and implement improvements. Prioritizing communication with families was strongly reinforced in the input sought from stakeholders through surveys, focus groups, public meetings, advisory groups and steering committees.

What is a WCMS

A WCMS supports the creation, management, publishing, and distribution of web content. It also manages the structure of our websites, the appearance of the published pages, and the navigation provided to our users. In addition, the WCMS selected for this project, SchoolFusion, is a K-12 specific tool that provides additional communication, calendaring, notification, and on-line classroom learning tools.

Goals of WCMS Project

The overall goals of the WCMS project are to:

• Increase family and community engagement by providing timely and accurate information that supports student learning. Research indicates that community and family engagement is essential to student academic achievement.
• Ensure equitable access to website management and on-line classroom learning tools for every school.
• Provide a long-term strategic web communications platform that saves money and resources.

Outcomes

The WCMS project will provide teachers and staff with easy to use tools for communicating with families and community members. The project will create significant improvements to the District’s on-line presence by unifying both the design and the navigation of all our Web sites, making it easier for our users to find the information they need. The WCMS will reduce the time and effort required to maintain and update our websites, allowing staff to publish information more quickly. In addition, our family of websites will be more reliable, supported, secure, and constantly improving as a result of this project.

Benefits

The WCMS project will make available a robust platform for District and school communications including:
• An integrated calendar
• Subscriptions and notification to relevant content updates
• Easy-to-use classroom pages
• Collaboration, social media, and messaging capabilities to support classroom learning in a controlled and moderated environment

Timeline

The WCMS will be implemented in phases. The first phase of the project will focus on the central District site and a pilot with several school sites. The new District site will launch by the end of 2010. We will use the lessons learned during deployment of the District site to help us deploy the individual school sites beginning in early 2011. All current school websites will remain live during the deployment and individual schools will make decisions about when their school is ready to transition their website to the new WCMS. We know that many schools have made significant investments in their current sites and we will collaborate with schools to determine how the new WCMS can dovetail with these efforts.

School Implementation of Web Content Management System

In the fall of 2010, ten schools participated in a pilot of the new WCMS to manage their school websites. We are using the lessons learned during implementation of the District website and pilot websites to help us make the WCMS available to all schools. All current school websites will remain live during the deployment and individual schools will make decisions about when their school is ready to transition their website to the new WCMS. We know that many schools have made significant investments in their current sites and we will collaborate with schools to determine how the new WCMS can dovetail with these efforts.

Additional Information