SchoolNet

Education Solution Provider Empowers Learning with Social Networking Web Site

SchoolNet provides Web-based solutions that help improve school performance and increase student achievement for some of the largest school districts in the United States. While excited to help educators increase student achievement, SchoolNet noted that educators lacked an efficient way to share their successes, best practices, and professional resources. The company wanted to provide a social networking environment where educators could share, review, and discuss the wealth of high-quality information, resources, and practices available. SchoolNet used Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to build, manage, and publish schoolnet.com, a K–12 achievement Web portal focused on empowering student success. Through schoolnet.com, SchoolNet is enhancing its reputation as a trusted resource for professional educators—and contributing to better learning outcomes.

 

Situation

SchoolNet provides some of the largest Kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade (K–12) school systems in the United States with Web-based solutions that help improve school administration, nurture educator and staff talent, and increase student achievement. SchoolNet develops and sells Instructional Management System (IMS) software that provides real-time data, reports, tools, and instructional content that school districts can use to assess student and school performance, develop talent, individualize instruction, ensure improvement, and comply with federal and state mandates.

We want to be… the company that makes life easier for educators. Using Office SharePoint Server 2007, we developed a tool that the entire education industry can use and rely on. Xavier Jenkins Online Ad Sales Manager, SchoolNet

Of the thousands of school districts in the United States, the largest 400 urban districts account for almost 50 percent of all U.S. students. Of those 400 school districts, 43 use SchoolNet’s IMS, including Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the District of Columbia. SchoolNet has been acknowledged by Inc. Magazine and Deloitte’s Fast 50 List as one of the fastest growing private companies in the United States.

To help meet new education mandates, including the federal No Child Left Behind Act, school districts have been collecting large amounts of data, student assessments, test results, standards and curriculum materials, instructional scope and sequence, and attendance information. Districts use SchoolNet IMS to aggregate and analyze existing data to locate achievement gaps within student populations and identify effective curriculum plans. Teachers can review the data and the findings and incorporate new emphases, topics, and best practices into their own curriculums.

“Using SchoolNet IMS, everyone in the district from the superintendent to the teachers can find information about budgets, student assessments, or curriculum management, and actually use the data to help drive achievement,” says Jason Stein, Product Manager at SchoolNet. “It can help districts manage schools, schools manage classrooms, and teachers manage individual students for success.”

The professionals at SchoolNet are excited to help teachers, principals, and superintendents improve the learning process for students. However, they noted that educators lacked an efficient way to network or to share best practices, professional resources, and past and current successes. Teachers and school administrators had to search hundreds of Web sites to find quality educational content. With so many sources to choose from, searches were time consuming and often unproductive.

SchoolNet recognized an opportunity to bring together an online K–12 education community around a single Web site where educators, parents, and students could aggregate, evaluate, and sort available content. The company wanted to develop a social networking site where diverse school districts meeting diverse challenges could have an opportunity to share, review, and discuss best practices. To help educators learn from one another what works, how, and for which students, SchoolNet understood that the site would need to promote effective peer-to-peer discussion, encouraging input from administrators, teachers, parents, and students.

The company also wanted to build the Web site using technology that would be quick to deploy, easy to manage, and scalable enough to provide new features as the site grew. Above all, SchoolNet wanted to maintain and enhance its reputation as a trusted, reliable source for high-quality educational resources by providing a site that would be familiar, inviting, and productive for users. “In education today, we need to learn from the people on the front lines and incorporate their successes into best practices,” says Xavier Jenkins, Online Ad Sales manager at SchoolNet. “We saw an opportunity for SchoolNet to provide the kind of omni-directional communication that could make that possible.”

Solution

SchoolNet began developing a social networking Web site where school administrators, teachers, and parents could find information and resources through a community focused on empowering student achievement. However, the company’s existing Web content management solution would not support key social networking functions, such as blogs, discussions, and wikis. SchoolNet worked with the Microsoft Technology Center and Aditi, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to evaluate the Web content management capabilities in Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.

Figure 1. “Viewpoints” members can read, rate, and offer input on blogs.

SchoolNet found that Office SharePoint Server 2007 not only supported key social networking features like blogs and wikis, but could also help manage dynamic user-generated content through workflows. The company could easily integrate Office SharePoint Server 2007 with its existing technology based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, build the site quickly, and add new features rapidly as the site grew.

In 2007, SchoolNet began working with Aditi to build, manage, and publish schoolnet.com, taking advantage of Aditi’s strong partnership with Microsoft, its experience with software-development clients, its proficiency in building online collaboration applications, and its expertise with SharePoint technologies. SchoolNet worked with Aditi to develop the site, integrating the native blog, forum, wiki, and search capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to build the application layer with a custom presentation which overcame challenges associated with browser compatibilities and layout design.

“We helped SchoolNet envision the application from both the business owner and the end-user perspective and extended the Web site to support all popular browsers which our target audience could use,” says Kavalpreet Ganti, Director Account Management at Aditi. “With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we gave SchoolNet the functionalities to easily manage social computing content and still have flexibility to develop the customized user interface that the company wanted.”

After launching schoolnet.com in February 2008, SchoolNet continues to work with Aditi on site enhancement and maintenance. “Aditi really took the time to understand what our goals were,” says Stein. “They helped us create a vision for the site, and then very quickly put it into a workable solution.”

At schoolnet.com, users can view, rate, and offer input on targeted blogs in a “Viewpoint” section; participate in moderated discussion forums; post questions to the schoolnet.com community; submit, edit, and read education-related content in a user-owned K–12 wiki encyclopedia; and upload documents into a shared file repository. To provide blog or wiki content or participate in discussion forums, users can register and create a profile page that displays biographical data and information about their areas of expertise or interest.

Figure 2. Members can use personal profiles to share their backgrounds and interests.

SchoolNet developed workflow processes to host blogs that are targeted at specific education topics, such as national and state legislation, resources for instructional material, technology in education, and issues regarding student discipline. Bloggers can submit topics to the site for approval, and then post original material, Web links, and documents, which are displayed with the bloggers’ profiles. Other registered users can rate and comment on the blogs to share their own experience and knowledge.

Using out-of-the-box functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007, SchoolNet developed a K–12 wiki site for schoolnet.com, a community owned encyclopedia that focuses on education. Educators, parents, and other schoolnet.com community members can use the wiki to submit, expand, and edit articles. Inaccuracies, unreferenced material, and other inappropriate content can be removed quickly by the community or Web site staff.

Every wiki article, blog, discussion forum, link, and document on schoolnet.com can be rated by the online community, and can be pulled in to the Viewpoint pages for discussion. “We believe that ratings, reviews, filtering, voting, and other social feedback tools will let the best content bubble up to where the most people can get the most use from it,” says Stein. 

In addition, SchoolNet used Office SharePoint Server 2007 live search to develop a vertical K–12 search engine that explores content on schoolnet.com and from other sites vetted by the community. SchoolNet developed workflows that enable community members to nominate a Web site to index on schoolnet.com, and after review and approval by SchoolNet and the online community, the site is added to a list of community-recommended sites. User searches will generate results that are specific to schoolnet.com and the recommended sites.

Next steps include building a method to push content from the community site into IMS by integrating search and Viewpoint posts, tying the schoolnet.com community to districts that use SchoolNet IMS software. When users sign in to IMS, they will receive access to a “My SchoolNet” page. Because the system can authenticate identity and credentials, users can click to and from IMS and schoolnet.com with a single sign on.

Benefits

With Office SharePoint server 2007, SchoolNet developed a Web site that empowers educators to build a better learning environment and drive student achievement, applying social networking concepts like user-generated content and user-generated ratings in easy-to-use but powerful ways. SchoolNet customers can use schoolnet.com to find instructional content, resources, materials, and tools from all over the Web and the education community.

We used Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create a personalized experience for users, with relevant and actionable content for a superintendent with 20,000 students or a teacher with a class of 20. Jason Stein Product Manager, SchoolNet

By using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to develop and manage schoolnet.com, SchoolNet created a satisfying customer experience, enhanced its brand, and is contributing to better learning outcomes in classrooms throughout the country. “We used Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create a personalized experience for users, with relevant and actionable content for a superintendent with 20,000 students or a teacher with a class of 20,” says Stein. 

Enhanced User Experience

SchoolNet and Aditi made a quality user experience a primary goal, and developed an intuitive and elegant user interface for the site. By providing a central location where the education community can evaluate resources within one application, SchoolNet offers users seamless navigation across multiple functionalities. “Early feedback from users is that the navigation is very simple and intuitive,” says Stein. “We wanted to make the site appealing and professional, and we accomplished it quickly and easily with Office SharePoint Server 2007. It’s something we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on, and we consider it a big win.”

Easy Scalability

Because Office SharePoint Server 2007 is easy to deploy and integrates seamlessly with the .NET Framework, SchoolNet can easily add features to schoolnet.com in response to customer demand and integrate the Web site with its IMS software. As schoolnet.com attempts to reach the nation’s 3.5 million teachers, it can start with the teachers who are already using SchoolNet IMS. By the beginning of the 2008 school year, SchoolNet anticipated integrating all of its current school districts with schoolnet.com, serving more than 150,000 educators and hosting 1 million unique visitors a month.

At the same time, schoolnet.com is attempting to reach school administrators, teachers, and parents throughout the country. SchoolNet can use the flexibility and scalability capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to meet the demands of increased traffic as the Web site serves more teachers, schools, and districts. “Our target markets are those 400 districts that represent 50 percent of all students,” says Stein. “The ability to get something to market quickly, add in new features rapidly, and handle increasing site traffic will help us reach them.”

Better Learning Outcomes

For SchoolNet, the most important benefit of using Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the opportunity to help improve K–12 education in the United States. By equipping schoolnet.com with powerful social networking capabilities, SchoolNet provides tools that district administrators, teachers, and parents can use to improve learning outcomes among students.

“Educators now have the opportunity to communicate best practices back and forth, learn from the data in a different way, and communicate with other districts and people around topics that support K–12 education,” says Jenkins. “By integrating the community site with our existing IMS solutions, we are aggregating a powerful audience together that is singularly focused on educational improvement.”

Enhanced Brand

By building an education Web site that complements its existing IMS software and offering an underserved set of professionals the opportunity to share experiences, expertise, and educational resources, SchoolNet is contributing to its reputation as a reliable resource for school districts. By building and managing schoolnet.com with Office SharePoint Server 2007, SchoolNet can get new Web site features to market quickly so that it can be more responsive to the schoolnet.com community. The company’s goal is to make schoolnet.com the most trusted education Web site in the world.

“We want to be the solutions company, the company that makes life easier for educators,” says Jenkins. “Using Office SharePoint Server 2007, we developed a tool that the entire education industry can use and rely on. It shows that we value this opportunity tremendously.”
 
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