Friday, January 25, 2008

Looking for "great" school websites

Amen to Jeanne. We too have used finalsite for seven years and it is an
awesome piece of software. Very user friendly and the support is excellent.
There are online user manuals with screen shots and they often send a file
through Zing that you can watch the steps. They also have finalsite
University each year in July that is free except for your transportation and
housing. Ps. The food is great!! They listen to your ideas and when at all
possible they implement them. They have several international schools as
well.

They also house our site and we have not been down a day since we have been
with them. We chose to let them house it rather than have it on campus.

Have a great day!
Thank you for your email,
Shirley
Shirley Fahringer Harris
Director of Technology
Stratford Academy
6010 Peake Rd.
Macon, GA 31220
478-477-8073 ext. 216


-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators
[mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of Jeanne Rice
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 8:45 AM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Re: Looking for "great" school websites

Hi Barbara,
You might want to check out schools that have use Finalsite
www.finalsite.com ..you can see some of the schools on the site
Our school uses it...and they have a lot of the features you describe and
much more... and our tech dinosaurs are able to use it with ease. Tech
support is awesome! I have worked with them for over 8 years.
Jeanne
Dr. Jeanne S. Rice, Secular Principal
Director of Admission
Southern CT Hebrew Academy
261 Derby Ave, Orange, CT 06477
(203) 795-5261
(203) 891-9719 fax
www.schacademy.org

I can make a difference!
My heart believes it. My actions will show it.

-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators
[mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU]On Behalf Of Barbara Cohen
Sent: Thu, January 24, 2008 7:23 PM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Looking for "great" school websites


Hi there,

I'm hoping that I can request a little bit of help from this awesome ISED
community -- I am attending a meeting tomorrow (Friday 1/25) morning to
deconstruct our current school website. We used one of the major Independent
School website vendors, and while the Development/Admissions folks are quite
happy with the external PR look and feel of our site, our intranet (with
portals for students, faculty, parents and alumni) has been incredibly
un-user-friendly, requires too much clicking and navigating for the
end-user, and is not so easy or intuitive for teachers who want to create
content for their class pages. Additionally, it has lots of limits in terms
of integrating with our email system, linking to blogs, and embedding Web
2.0 features and widgets (blogs, flickr libraries, etc.)

I've been given the homework of finding some "great" school websites. Based
on the shortcomings I've described above, do any of you have some good
examples you could send my way? Hopefully this might be useful to some of
the rest of you out there as well.

(I apologize for the cross-post...I posted this to the Classroom 2.0 and
ISENET Ning groups as well...)

Thanks so much,
Barbara Cohen, Educational Technology Coordinator
Marin Country Day School
bcohen@mcds.org
http://barblcohen.edublogs.org

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