Parent Portal AUP

We did not feel we could launch the parent portal, without putting a specific AUP in place. Below is the AUP (Revision 1), I am sure that this will need to be tweaked and re-issued over the next few weeks, but it is a starting point. Feel free to lift it for your own use, I am all for sharing!

All Parents/Guardians are required to sign up to this acceptable use policy before they log in to the parent portal for the first time. They must accept the conditions set out below in order to access any material. This policy remains in effect for all subsequent login's. If the policy changes the policy will be reissued and re-acceptance sort. If you breach any of these conditions, the college reverses the right to deny access to the Parent Portal.
Account Security
· Each individual is responsible for the security and use of their Username and password.
· You are not allowed to use the account, Username or password of any other user.
· You must not disclose your Username or password to anyone else.
Communication

When using the communication facilities (forums) YOU MUST:
· Respect other people's views and beliefs.
· Only post comments which are appropriate to the particular discussion.
· Remember that you are conversing with real people.
· By contributing posts to any forum within the parent portal you are granting a license to the school to reproduce the content of your posting, and you are also granting a license to other users to download or copy the content in accordance with these conditions.
· You must give due acknowledgement for material quoted from other sources.
When using the communication facilities YOU MUST NOT:
· Post anything abusive, defamatory, obscene or otherwise illegal.
· Post any personal or private information on any individual.
· Use forums to air grievances, grievances should be made in accordance with college procedures.
· Copy or forward any communication without permission.
· Include material which is confidential or the copyright of which is owned by someone else, unless you have first obtained permission.
· Post material which contains viruses or other programs which may disrupt the school's systems.
· Post any advertising or promotional material.
· Behave in an impolite or offensive manner.
Copyright
You are permitted to view, copy, and print documents hosted within the parent portal subject to your agreement that:
· Your use of the material is for your own personal information, and for non-commercial purposes only.
· You will not modify the documents or graphics in any form or manner.
· You will not copy or distribute graphics separately from their accompanying text and you will not quote materials out of their context.
Please read this document carefully. If you violate these provisions, access to the parent portal will be denied. Additional action may be taken by the school in line with existing policy. Where appropriate, police may be involved or other legal action taken.

I have read and understand the above and agree to use the school computer facilities within these guidelines.

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Parent Portal launches to Year 7 parents

I know it has been a while since my last post, and for that I apologise. It has been a truly manic few weeks back focusing on getting technology, protocols, pedagogy and practice right for our launch of the parent portal. I'm going to endeavour to put together some of the key elements we have worked through in recent weeks to see a really successful launch event as we have this evening. I'll make my apologies in advance for any incoherence in the post - final preparations for launch have taken their toll a bit on me this week and I'm somewhat deprived of sleep!

STRUCTURE OF THE PORTAL

I will endeavour to put a video walk through up of our initial parent portal some time during the next two weeks but as a quick summary I will list how we have structured our phase 1 portal. I say phase 1 as I am sure that the portal will develop in the next few weeks, especially when parents start to engage through the discussion forums and start to throw ideas back at us.

My Child Area - Access to MIS data (Currently Attendance, SIMS lesson monitor, SIMS behaviour log). We have stats pages for attendance and behaviour. Attendance statistics can be analysed by day, period and subject. Every parent has a child overview page that summarises key data and allows them to select each child. on this overview page is the current days timetable, attendance summary, list of teachers and news feed.

The news feed is really interesting as it very much takes the feed you might have on Facebook, but is focused on educational content not people. It summarises legal registration sessions, lesson monitor but also when assignments are issued to the child. All a parent has to do to access the assignment is click on the item in the feed. The assignment will open in a new window and by the way that FROG lessons are structured signposted all the resources that are needed for the student. This will help parents support their children in a much more focused way.

We then have a series of information pages - nested pages for our twitter feed, Youtube channel, school day, canteen menu, homework, bus timetables, extra curricular clubs, PTA and governor information, technology to support learning. Parents also have access to online letters (all main letters - year group/trips/whole school are placed on here in pdf format), college calendar, newsletter, discussion forums, parent surveys, college documents (policies etc...), reporting of student absence.

For launch we have not gone mad with discussion forums at all - there is one forum, entitled parent portal, which is for them to chat about the portal, what they think of it, and give the college some honest feedback. We had the first post within 40 minutes of the launch event finishing. Already we are getting excited about directions the portal will take. I think the general concensus of our parents is how can we support our child and help them with their studies, not just accessing data about them so I can see subject specific support forums being developed, along with specific parental support areas for English and Maths in the short term, other subjects to follow.

For those of you who have been following my blog and/or have heard me speak about parental engagement you will know we're passionate about true engagement at Costello, not just presenting data, information at best, to parents, but getting parents more involved in the processes associated with education and learning. This will become evident when you see how our parent portal structure is beginning to evolve.

When you log on to our portal you are greeted with an initial screen that takes parents to the AUP - this is an online copy of the paper AUP they have signed and only appears the first time they log on. FROG keeps an audit of when each parent accepted the T&C (form database) for reference. This method of putting the AUP is excellent, if/when the AUP is updated we can just reissue the page to all parents - simple!

LOGISTICS OF ISSUING USERNAMES/PASSWORDS

This can be a logistical nightmare, so I'll discuss what we have done - having now gone through the process with 1 year group it actually works quite well. We all know that there is a big emphasis on safeguarding, and with current government department legislation on how usernames/passwords can be disseminated (i.e. not using postal systems) it was clear that sending username/passwords out through the post would not cut it at all. So, here is a breakdown of the processes followed.

• Parent accounts set up in FROG - you cannot exported all parental details, including username and password as a csv file for security reasons. We downloaded every parental user, including FROGid, full address, firstname, surname, username, child name(s) as a csv and used some vb to create random (strong) passwords into the csv file. This was then uploaded back to FROG to populate the system with the new generic, yet strong passwords.
• The CSV file created was then used to create the mail merge letters (making sure that we had sorted by parent surname / firstname so that all letters would print in order). Letter had parental address on it.
• Letters printed and split, put in windowed envelope into 5 alphabetical sections to split the work
• Written copy of the Parent Portal AUP inserted into envelopes - these to be signed and returned to school
• Run a launch event for the parent portal for each year group. At beginning of evening 5 staff man the boxes of letters. Parents filter to correct queue with proof of identity and address. This information cross matched against the details on the envelope. Once satisfied of identity staff then give parent letter.
• Most parents opened letters whilst there and duly signed the AUP - we had a drop box out for parents to leave them with us at end of evening.

The fact that we did this has been very well received by parents, they are appreciative of the sensitive nature of the information that can be accessed through these accounts and were fully supportive of the processes we adopted. There were a few positive comments that clearly indicated that parents were impressed with the care we have gone to.

We still have a large percentage of letters to be collected so I will be mass texting all of Y7 parents tomorrow, encouraging them to come in with proof of id/address to collect them. Failing this we can do another hit at our Y7 tutors evening that is in a few weeks time.

Running a launch event for the portal has worked really well, it gives the school the opportunity to do a live demo and really secure their vision in the minds of the parents and help set expectations on how it is to be used. Although not made explicit in what we presented, there is an underlying expectation that parents will use the portal. The evening that was run for Y7 parents was not all about the parent portal it was the first time new Y7 parents have been invited in to the college and they also had a settling in talk-supporting their child as well as the option to attend 5 different workshops that were being hosted.

So, you can look forward to a number of up and coming blog posts about how things are going!

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Parental Engagement - FROG Conference 2009

Many of you will know that this year I presented a session on parental engagement and use of online portals at the FROG National learning platform conference, June 2009. I have been through my presentation again and recorded a screencast (below) for those that missed it.

I hope to be blogging quite a bit more about the development of our parent portal over the next few weeks, the summer term is always a good term for extended work on projects and we will be in a position to roll out our parent portal to all our parents ready for the start of the new academic year in September. Enjoy the video - you might want to get a tea/coffee, it's about 40 mins :)

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Feedback from Parent Focus Group Meeting

The inaugural parent focus group meeting took place last night at the college and was a fantastic event from the college perspective. It will prove extremely useful in shaping where we move developments with the parent portal. What also became evident was that parents are engaged by becoming engaged - if that makes sense!

7 parents attended the evening that ran from 7pm until gone 9pm - I was only expecting to go on for about an hour and a half, but the discussions we got into were extremely interesting - for everyone! The parents represented a cross section of the college community with parents from all year groups being represented and the number present was just right to get some good discussion going. We started by giving parents an overview of FROG from a student's perspective and this immediately confirmed the need to run some sessions on this alone for parents - to develop their understanding of FROG and what it can do. I will be arranging some parent insight sessions on FROG in the new year.

It was clear that parents want more than just an online presence they can visit to get key information. Parents do want to be able to interact on many different levels and get involved with the broader community life at Costello. We started by unpicking what key data/information parents would like to have access to, the following was identified as important:

Student Progress/targets - Parents want access to targets, current working grades/levels but some sort of trend analysis. What is really important is communicating back to parents current targets to facilitate improvement (text comment).

Behaviour - Rewards/Reprimands, along with other positive comments. Not huge amount of detail -just an overview.

Attendance - Pretty much what I thought it would be. Have already discussed this with Jonathan and Craig at FROG. When parents view attendance data they would like to have flagged dates that have unexplained absences so they can send this info to the school via an online form. I.e. parents see exception report and can deal with sorting out reasons.

Key dates for homework assignments/coursework deadlines

Information on Examination courses - exam boards, specifications, past papers etc..

Student timetable

College Calendar - parents would like to be able to export the calendar in different formats (iCAL etc...) so that they can important into their own diaries - thought this was a cool idea.

Interestingly parents are not interested in accessing actual lesson content but having access to project/lesson summaries is more appropriate. For example, a couple of parents talked at length about being able to view student assignments on their diary - when they click on it a simple 2-3 sentence summary of the task is displayed - ideal when the student has not written the task down properly in their diary (HW). Some felt that having access to additional support materials was important to supplement this.

We got into the discussion about different styles of parenting and that actually having some information available to parents could have a negative impact on students and teacher/student relationships. The group felt that students could have access to some privacy settings so that they can decide whether parents can access some elements of content. For example - the discussion that takes places between a teacher and student in terms of feedback is quite private, but a student could decide to allow their parents to see this. Parents agreed that things like attendance/behaviour/grades/progress data would not have privacy settings.

All parents want good quality TWO way communication between themselves and school, a number said that this is one of the key differences between education in the primary and secondary sectors. They want the facility to send notes to students tutors. Ability to contact tutors/teachers directly through the portal - but without necessarily knowing the teachers email address. Parents felt this was important to safeguard staff. To keep things simple they would like to be able to click on a contact subject style button that would bring up a message dialogue box and then send info directly to the relevant teacher (linked to student/subject via MIS). This can open dialogue between parents and staff.

Extra Curricular Activities

These came up on a number of different levels. Parents would like to see an online database of all the clubs available (managed by teachers with basic info) that students can then subscribe to, to attend. But FROG is then used by whoever is running the club to take a register so that parents can check attendance. They felt this was important when some activities might be paid for by parents.

Online discussion forums

These were discussed in quite a lot of detail and seen as having huge potential to engage parents. Parents want to engage with a variety of different formats. Forums where they can engage with each other - parenting support etc... But also forums for feedback and advice on supporting parents. They also felt a parental forum that was Q&A between parents and the senior leadership team was a fantastic idea, with SLT response time targets. It is clear that the majority of parents want to "assist both the school and the student." Parents want discussion forums that teachers do not have access too as well.

Online Booking System for Parents Evenings

This was something that all parents said would be brilliant and would definitely get used every time. When a parents evening is scheduled, parents log on and see the time slots available for the relevant subject staff and can book slots. Print summary of bookings ready for evening - staff do same.

Online Payments

This was something that everyone said. Parents said they would like to be able to make payments for various things through the portal - such as school trips, peri music lessons - even to the extent of cashless catering systems. Parents mentioned that different payment options would be attractive such as Google checkout, paypal as well as PDQ/merchant services. The more I thought about this, the more I am convinced of the value of this service. However, online payment processing does need investigation from a school perspective in terms of how third party systems can link in with our financial systems etc...

Online satisfaction surveys

Parents are keen to support schools by providing feedback to inform strategic planning - whether it be the annual parent survey or other surveys that focus on smaller school improvement projects.

Method of dealing with forgotten password

The login page must have someway of sending a parent an updated password if current one is forgotten. Parents want the system to collect personal email addresses as they are also keen to get info pushed to them, rather than just pulling information by logging onto the portal. In terms of parental engagement this kind of tug of war is important and we'll miss out if we do not address this.

Having thought about this overnight I think parents should have a profile page (bits of which they could make public etc..) but we ensure they enter their own email address - it's their responsibility to keep this up to date. This way if password is forgotten we have an email address to automatically generate and send details of replacement too. Parents also quite liked the idea of being able to sign up for different kinds of email alert, rather than having to rely on logging into the portal all the time. This could be managed via this profile page. Think there is a great deal to be learnt from Facebook actually!

All in all a really good meeting - my head is now full of great ideas.

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Parent Portal Focus Group

Have shaped our pilot of Event Elephant around our parent portal and how it will take shape over the next year. I have set up and event using the product which parents will be attending next week. You can have a look here - whole site/event took less than 10 minutes to set up. Event was marketing to parents through newsletter and SMS text, so far I have got a nice group forming ready for the meeting next week. It's going to be very interesting to get the parent dimension.

It would be great to have this kind of functionality within our learning platform for event management, or at least link to other services via OpenAPI. Event Elephant is looking like a very interesting product to enhance parental engagement through facilitating and managing the co-ordination of school events.

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Parental Engagement: Turning Vision into Reality

I've been putting a great deal of thinking into the parent portal and reading through the Becta toolkit has stimulated an awful lot of thought in terms of what a parent portal should look like, key functionality and how it may be presented to parents. It's got me thinking about how important it is to end up with a system that is continually used by parents - has enough hooks to make sure they keep coming back for more. At Costello we are not wanting to rush into the launch of a fully fledged parent portal that sees a rush of parents clambering to access the portal, only to log on once and then never return.

As a result we're not rushing, we're taking our time, doing our market research to ensure we end up with a solution that's going to work by supporting our parents and giving them something they want to engage with and use on a regular basis. Our newsletter went out last week, I put in a big article about FROG, securing the vision of where E-Learning is going at the college as well as a request to set up a parent focus group. This focus group has a clear brief, to give parents the opportunity to help shape the vision that will drive the parent portal forward. It's going to be really interesting what gets discussed and how things may well be prioritised differently by parents.

Response has been good, with a number of parents emailing me to express their interest over the past few days - using our SMS texting service to remind parents of the opportunity certainly helped to bring in the responses - proves a point about technology facilitating collaboration and enhancing communication.

Initial meeting is going to me 2nd December and I'm going into this meeting with a totally open mind, at no point are they going to be steered at all. The meeting is going to start at 7pm and will start with an overview of the FROG implementation that our students have. We'll then give an overview of what we are wanting to achieve and outline the format of the meeting, which I expect to last for about an hour -maybe more if they really get stuck in! Am looking forward to posting the outcomes of the meeting!

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Working with FROG on Parental Engagement

Had a very interesting meeting with Jonathan and Craig at FROG today using Adobe Connect. Although FROG have access to what I am assuming is a sandboxed SIM's implementation back up in Halifax they're interesting in seeing real implementations of SIM's. Meeting raised a number of key issues - do all schools use same SIM's codes for registration, in the same way. The biggest challenge by far is the very different way that schools will have implemented Assessment Manager to cater for their own data needs. There is no national schema of naming conventions for aspects held within assessment manager which creates some interesting challenges to solve. However, marksheets are used to aggregate data for departments. These could be used as a staging post for getting data to FROG, interesting.....

From my perspective it was a really interesting meeting as it has shaped FROG's development angles for me and has helped me to gain an understanding into a little bit more as to where things may lead in the future and the developers route that may be taken to get there.

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Musings about SIM's

Lots of recent conversations that I have had with all sorts of people (Headteachers, county advisors, SIM's administrators) have really opened up a can of worms regarding SIM's - namely assessment manager, and attendance and how data can be defined and presented very differently from one school to the next.

This may not seem like an issue for schools, but it is certainly an issue for developers. SIM's databases have grown in a very dynamic, organic way - often reflecting the people in the school and the way they work, with systems changing when personnel change. When SIM's was conceived I don't think Capita even thought that they would be opening access to the database to third parties. It is this lack of vision and standardisation with MIS data that is going to be an interesting challenge that developers are going to have to contend with - how can we get a solution that fits all schools when schools have very different looking back end databases in the way that they work.

From a third party developer's perspective I can see the problems (we'll call them challenges) that they are going to have to contend with over the next few months as products become available to present data (hopefully information!) to various audiences, including parents. Let's start with a few of the problems that I can see straight away:

• All schools use assessment manager in different ways to store attainment data on students. There is no set naming schema for aspects (fields) in SIM's that schools have been encouraged to adhere to. The only pre-defined data structure, with naming conventions in SIM's is the common transfer dataset - used by primary schools to export data from their systems which then gets aggregates by LA's and then sent out to respective secondary schools. With developments in FROG this is going to be an interesting challenge. In effect schools are going to need a degree of control as to how field mapping is undertaken so that the right data is mapped to fields in the FROG database. This is a rather simplistic analogy but it will do for the time being.
• Attendance codes - do all schools use exactly the same codes in exactly the same way?
• Volume of data - providers really need to develop live links back to the database so that large volumes of data do not need to sit on their own systems. This needs to be transparent to the user in terms of access speed. I can see FROG being at an advantage here as the majority of FROG servers are installed locally and have local access to the SIM's server. It is going to be interesting to see how web hosted solutions deal with this, they are going to need access to SIM's data over the web - this creates it's own set of speed/QoS/security issues.
• Some schools set up different aspects for reporting rather than date stamping one field. E.g. reporting a subject three times a year, aspect may be coded Art7.1,Art7.2,Art7.3. The nomenclature used will vary considerably from one school to another. This is going to cause problems when aggregating data for the purposes of presenting progress data in the form of line graphs etc
• Defining aspects, the data validation rules that schools use will not be consistent from one school to the next. When an aspect is set up, such as a grade aspect one school might just be using KS3 standard codes for levels and letter codes for things such as dis-applied etc... But other schools may be using sub-levels to give a more granular feel to progress measures. E.g. sub dividing levels into thirds (4a - top third of level 4, 4c - bottom third of level)
• The SIM's data you see is sometimes dependant on how it was input into SIM's, this is down to Capita and is going to cause headaches. It should not matter the method used to get the data into the database. Whatever way you query it, it should give the same result!
• Trying to work with the SIM's database - self explanatory! The database has been built of a number of years without Capita stepping back, rationalising systems and doing re-writes.

Being selfish and thinking about our own platform and FROG puts a number of really interesting balls in the air. It's almost as though there is the need for some sort of admin console that is the engine through which the school can contextualise the SIM's data for integration and use within FROG. Am going to have a think about this before I chat to Jonathan North on Friday.

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Parent Portal - Attendance

Attendance is one of the compulsory elements of online, real time reporting as outlined by the DCSF for one of the 2010 targets.

Vision

Parents can access attendance data - not just as a pie chart but as a yearly summary so they can actually see the assigned marks. Invariably when parents look at a pie chart they will start to question the data. It would therefore be sueful for them to have access to a yearly summary. Alongside this if they have particular dates they want to query an online form can be used to send information back to the school to ensure that records are up to date and correct.

This is very attractive from a school perspective as it would help to catch those 'missing marks' and ensure data integrity - in many cases, improving school attendance statistics. Parents can make contact through the portal to advise our attendance officer of changes that can then be made. We can take this is an authenticated source due to authentication within the parent portal.

Issues as far as I can see:

• Do all schools SIM's attendance codes in exactly the same way - is there consistency so that this can be coded into FROG? What do other platforms such as SERCO do?
• Aggregation of data back to a FROG server is going to eat up storage - live data connection back to query the SIM's database is the future. Will also give access to pseudo-realtime reporting of data. Interesting that Becta in the toolkit do not really shed any light on how the term 'real time' reporting should be interpreted.

All schools are set attendance targets via Local Authorities DCSF. One of the issues with attendance data is giving it a context for the parent so that the reported headline figures are easy to interpret. This is something for individual schools to contend with.

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Useful websites - Parental Engagement

Some useful websites on parental engagement:
Becta

“Engaging Parents in raising Achievement: Do Parents Know they Matter?”

“The Impact of Parental Involvement, Parental Support and Family
Education on Pupil Achievement and Adjustment: A Review of Literature.”

An Ofsted survey: “Parental Involvement in Children’s Education (PICE) Survey (2007).”

The Children’s Plan: building brighter futures (Dec 2007)

Enjoy :)

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Exploiting ICT to improve parental engagement

At Costello we are at an interesting crossroads with regards to the development of a parent portal. We have something waiting in the wings, ready to go public, but are currently working closely with FROG to develop some of the key functionality that will help us to realise the 2010 targets quite a bit earlier.

The Becta toolkit suggests a normal of key milestones to manage this change: allocate responsibility within your school leadership team (guess that's me), assess where your school is regarding online reporting using the Becta framework, consult all stakeholders including governors, staff, parents and learners to agree the strategy and vision that suits the context of your school, consider how progress could be made in each of the four framework strands and plan accordingly, contact your local authority to discuss specific plans, initiatives or partnerships that may already be in place, consult ICT suppliers, advisors and consultants to investigate possible solutions to support your school vision.

We we have got to so far is this, our whole E-Learning procurement was really based on a wider E-Strategy remit, with full stakeholder representation to shape the broadbrush vision. I am currently going through the Becta framework to see where we are, more out of curiousity than anything else as I know we have the capacity to incorporate enhanced parental engagement and have the capacity for change management.

One of the key drivers at the moment is the establishment of a parent focus group that is going to focus on unpicking what parents actually want to see and be able to do with regard to the education of their children. I put an article in the current newsletter (went home Friday to all parents) and have already received a few emails from parents expressing an interest in working with the school to shape our vision for the parent portal. The other driver to get this group established is that I want to be able to feedback this information directly to FROG. I am really excited about the opportunity to work, once again with a third party to develop what I am sure will be a product that can lead the marketplace and well ahead of its time in terms of key functionality.

I am hoping to get a meeting set before the christmas holidays so that I can bring the group up to where we are at the moment and give them the opportunity for some blue sky thinking. I am hoping that much of what they will be saying and requesting has been scoped already but it is important to get people involved and take some ownership of new developments.

I am toying with the idea of going live with our current portal soon - something that I have been running through in my own mind for a couple of weeks now. On the one hand I recognise the advantage of going live with a fully fledged product but on the other I could be using the forums within our current parent portal to get more feedback and keep parents informed as to what key developments are next on the horizon. Decisions, decisions. I know that I would get far more feedback from the masses by doing this than holding a meeting, but it would be a very different kind of feedback. That parent focus group will be the forum to ask lots of probing questions to shape ideas. I think the two approaches can compliment each other.

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Exploiting ICT to improve parental engagement, moving towards online reporting: Toolkit

Yes, all research does point to parents being able to have a positive impact on student attainment - it's official. The Becta toolkit (published May 2008) outlines how parents can and do have a positive impact on their children's attainment at school. It is all about how we can get parents more involved in this process cloud called education. I think there is a link between the experience that parents had at school and those experienced by their children. The challenge in theory, is a simple one - how can we get more parents to engage in their children's education, more of the time. How can we put them in the driving seat to pull information when they want it to help foster a true working partnership, seeing parents setting and securing high aspirations for the futures of their children. It is about educating parents about education, giving them access to information that they can use to reinforce expectations at home but about empowering them to work collaboratively with their children and teachers - even other parents. How much of this are we going to be able to do with Web 3.0 - really exciting times ahead.

What I found really interesting by reading this document is that there seems to be quite a large emphasis on pushing information out, with some two-way communication of information. Personally I think the key point here is being missed, it is not just about information but interaction and setting opportunities for broader collaboration. The Children's Plan states - 'receive and access information about their children’s work, progress, attendance and behaviour when and where they want'. But it is this and so much more, is it all about receiving and accessing information? I question whether what would be presented to parents is actually information in the first place, isn't it data? Information is data that has been processed, data is raw facts and figures. What is so important is that whatever data we produce for parents is processed in such a way that it is meaningful information. Just having some obscure percentage attendance data for example, may not really be very useful for a parent. It needs putting into context and interpreting, often into layman terms so that we are inclusive. Your son's current attendance of 85% is below the school average, over the course of 5 years this is the equivalent of missing x weeks of school - is far more useful for a parent than just a percentage alone.

There has always been this triad relationship in education between institutions, students and their parents and current technology should be underpinning the foundations of this 3 way relationship. When this is done successfully pay back is huge, there is a strong, underlying learning community - all parties can access and interpret information but it is also putting parents in the driving seat that little bit more to secure improvement - not just for their children but for the whole school through extended collaboration and involvement in broader improvement projects.

Within the toolkit there is a nice diagram (Section1:4) that did hit a chord with me and that was that whatever is done needs to be timely, manageable and meaningful - exactly what is taught within many an A-level ICT course for system requirements. I think these are very pertinent and can be used as a useful steer when opening up the whole conversation about functionality and key requirements of a parent portal. Something that I will endeavour to remember when developing future posts on this topic.

Without getting into really detailed discussion about the component parts of a parent portal the underlying core values that will be communicated through a strategic vision can be fairly easy to list - I am really interested to see what you think on this, so please feel free to leave comments.

Benefits to parents

• In control, they decide what they want see and when
• Data is turned into useful information that is easy for parents to understand and interpret
• Parents develop a deeper understanding of the educational experience their children have
• They feel empowered - opportunities to collaborate and get more involved with the school
• Enhanced capacity to support their children's education
• Enhanced dialogue with teaching staff
• Direct support to help raise their child's achievement
• Engagement with community learning projects
• Access to resources to help shape their understanding of their role - parents play a very important within education

Benefits to school

• Improved dialogue with parents
• Enhanced parent support
• Enhanced parental engagement that will enable parents to impact more on whole school improvement projects
• Parents feel empowered to make more of a difference
• More efficient workflows for administration
• Enhanced communication between home and school
• Seamless integration using IT systems
• Teachers with more time to focus on delivering high quality lessons
• Re-focus parent consultation evenings
• Sustainable schools - less paper!
• Open up more opportunities - family learning etc

Benefits to learners

• Showcase work to parents
• Enhanced support at home - parents in position to be more supportive, be more positive with praise and take an interest. This leads to improved motivation and engagement
• Developing systems that address the way in which they interact with modern society
• E-Learning engages learners, providing them with tools to access the world of collaborative work and sharing of ideas on the Internet

Benefits to broader community

• Effective marketing and administration of community learning opportunities
• Enhanced social networking through the parent portal - e.g. discussion forums for parents to engage in
  

I'm sure that I will be putting some posts together that try and capture the key functionality of a parent portal over the next few weeks so watch this space.

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Data security - issuing credentials to parents

Was at a meeting today where I was talking to some colleagues and throwing some ideas around regarding parental portal. It struck me after the chat we had that there are a myriad of issues to think through regarding data security. The government has just released the latest interim report on data security/handling guidelines. Schools fall under this broad banner and also have to comply with these guidelines. It does throw up a few points to consider when shaping our parent portal.

Firstly - according to the guidelines we cannot send a username/password home via the post for parents. This presents a few initial problems. Having had a think about this there are a couple of ways forward. A system of identity verification could be set up that works in the following way:

Parent visits public page - puts in answers to a few personal questions - answers validated against MIS data - e.g. DOB of eldest student in school, postcode, mobile no. etc.... They are also prompted to enter their own personal email address - this information is data mined and attached back in to the parent so we have an additional contact email. FROG the sends user logon details via automated email back to parent with a validation hyperlink to activate account. Parent logs on with system generated password and then must change it immediately. By collecting an external email address in this manner it is easy to integrate a lost password option into the system.

Other method is crude and comes with bigger administration overheads - physically give parents the details at face to face events such as parents evenings - this would only have to happen in Y1. In subsequent years it would be Y7 parents who do not have any older siblings that would go through this process

Similar issues arise with the disseminations of user credentials to users of say, a transition portal.

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