In a previous post (NPS Portal Possibilities), I talked about the different kinds of portals that exist or may soon exist in the Newton Public Schools. And I gave a brief definition of what a portal is.

Now, I want to breakdown and further describe how we might segment the functionality of a school portal into a few, well-defined buckets. I've been thinking about it for Newton Public Schools, I put together the following three graphics to define four major components, in terms of their purpose, functionality and technology behind the scenes.

Figure 1: Four Major Functional Areas

As you see, Figure 1 depicts the four major functional areas: Learning Management, Content Management, Contact Management and Student Management.

Learning Management is just a specialized case of Content Management, focused on content and collaboration around the learning curriculum.

Contact Management is particularly compelling to me, because (a) it's such a labor-intensive and error-prone activity, (b) it could dramatically improve the family experience of managing their contact info and preferences, especially when they have students spread across multiple schools, and (c) it could greatly improve the sharing of information and events--not only within a school but across the district.

Student Management is the hardest nut to crack, both in terms of technical integration with our chosen School Management System (Chancery SMS), as well as protecting the highly sensitive student records.

In terms of priorities, the School Portal pilot has concluded that Learning Management is our highest priority right now. Fortunately, there's already been a pilot going at Bigelow, so we already have some momentum that we plan to extend with new pilots at several other schools next fall.

It seems that Content and Contact Management capabilities might be best piloted through some of our PTO organizations and their websites, where the benefits could be greatest in the near-term and the risks are lower, due to being outside the regulations of an official school entity.

Student Management is our lowest priority.

Figure 2 provides some examples of functionality that each major component enables.

Figure 3: Technologies Being Explored or Piloted

Figure 3 identifies some of the key technologies being explored or piloted for each of the functional areas.

These graphics, along with some other slides, are also available in the attached Powerpoint file NPS_Portal_Story_04-29-08.ppt.