Leap of Faith - Powerschmoogle!

Our school is taking a huge leap of faith this year and re-thinking our school communication tools.  A decision has been made to move from our old systems to an amalgamation of Powerschool, Moodle and Google Apps that will completely change the way that we communicate, teach and learn at ACS.  At the end of the day, this change is going to allow our school to accomplish some major goals

•  Improve communication – with limitless user accounts provided by Google, we will now be able to give all of our parents user accounts.  Parents will be able to log in to a portal (Moodle) and access all Google functions, as well as read email from their school account.
•  Privacy – because we are provided with our own domain, a lot of school content can be created and displayed within our school wide system
•  Move to 2.0 – this platform will allow for our entire community to have access to blogs, wikis, Google docs, etc, and provide our students with a greater number of opportunities to learn how to use these important tools
•   Sustainability – since this system will be our primary method of communication, the need for hard copies of school letters, information and report cards will disappear (I hope). 

I am extremely excited about this change, but I also know that it is not going to be easy.  In order to ensure that all of our community members understand how to utilize the system, we will need to devote a lot of resources to training for students, teachers and parents.   Although this will be difficult and at times messy, I am glad that we have made this decision that will help our school to develop and grow as a community.  By identifying the targets of why we need to change, and looking for tools that will help us accomplish our goals, we have been able to find a solution that I believe will improve our school.