Educational Web Applications
The Portal Manager application was developed as an extension of the Build Your Own Website™ (BYOW) classroom content management system. Using the same "plug-in" approach as BYOW, the Portal Manager allowed individually "owned" teacher, student, and parent accounts to be networked into the school and/or district level. In addition to being a "point-and-click simplicity" content manager for the portal-level websites, it also provided more top-down control, many-to-many communication, aggregation of classroom content (which could be published to the school/district websites and/or shared with other classrooms), and data-mining ability.
Overview of
Build Your Own Website™ (BYOW) was originally designed to be used at the classroom level, but it wasn't long before we were receiving requests for school-level website accounts. Although BYOW was a content management system at its core, it was not optimally designed for school-wide usage. We immediately began meeting with teachers and school administrators to develop plans for a complimentary application called the Portal Manager. New publishing tools were created to address the needs of school/district websites, and classroom accounts were modified to connect to school accounts in the same manner that student accounts plugged into classroom accounts. To add further flexibility, portal administrators were given the ability to create "clusters" within the portal. A cluster was simply a grouping of classroom or student accounts. This feature allowed schools to create special pages for clubs and other groupings, as well as aggregate data in various categories such as subject matter or grade level.
The Strategic Partner Library was also adapted to a more celluar model at this time. Each school and/or district could, in effect, now operate their own SPL. Each of these libraries, in turn, could be plugged into the master library operated by WGTE Public Media. The entire system was now a truly multi-celluar organism.
The Portal Manager proved effective for both schools and districts, and was soon also being used in several state-wide inquiry-based educational projects. Much like a school or district, the project website included the ability for classrooms and students to "plug in". In many ways, the resulting network was very similar to the personal social networks that are popular today. Student account could be connected to multiple classrooms, a school, a district, and one or more projects. As classrooms plugged into these projects, they also opened connections to other educational resource providers such as museums, science centers, and zoos. Outside expert accounts were modified to include specialized "evaluator" accounts that were used to
monitor and assess the project in real time.
While the Portal Manager began as a school-level addition to Build Your Own Website™, it eventually became a flexible tool for peer-to-peer networking, project management, and resource sharing across a diverse range of users.
Crystal Award for Excellence
Invitation to PBS Academy
