Portfolio: Aurora School

The Organization: Aurora School is a private K-5 school in Oakland, California. The school promotes a Progressive approach to its curriculum and classroom experiences. The student body is approximately one hundred students. The staff is composed of twenty five teachers, teaching assistants and specialists as well as seven administrators and support staff.

Their Needs: As part of their communications plan, Aurora School was seeking a method for the teachers to relay information to parents by using the web. The school had a fair amount of content that was not meant for public consumption but needed to be shared with families of the students, such as forms, homework assignments, pictures of classroom activities, project results, field trip coordination, schedules, and more.

The Solution: We found free, open-source software that was designed for communities to share ideas and files, and generally connect with each other. We installed and customized the software for the school, trained the staff and wrote help pages for the parents. The school received a variety of functions for an extremely affordable entry price:

• teachers can categorize information and maintain their own homepages
• teachers can send announcements and newsletters to parents via email
• teachers can post pictures of student activities
• parent volunteers can maintain information like calendars and schedules
• staff can make forms, permission slips and other files available online
• parents maintain their own email addresses and can share them with other parents
• parents can find answers to their questions in FAQs

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