How to Choose a School Message Board
If you are planning to develop a school message board, the good news is that you can avoid design costs by simply signing up to use the free online message board that comes bundled with the IQity Learning Suite. But to help you make an informed choice, let's look at the three most important features of online message boards that make them great tools for busy teachers, parents and students.
What to Look for in a School Message Board
The first thing to think about is the appearance of your school message board. Since it is where students and parents will go for information updates, you want it to properly represent the school. Be sure you can use your school logo and colors on the school message board. This lets you maintain the school's visual identity in your communications with the school community. Also, insist on a clean, uncluttered design. You don't want your message getting lost among distractions like unrelated ads or pop-up boxes.
A major consideration needs to be ease of use. You are going to be updating the school message board frequently. Chances are that you will not want to assign that responsibility to an employee with extensive computer technology skills, so be sure that adding information to the school message board does not require special expertise. Nor do you want a teacher to spend inordinate amounts of time posting classroom announcements to the school message board. That's time that could be spent teaching, preparing for class, or grading assignments. The easier it is to update the school message board, the better. Remember too that the school message board needs to be easy for students and parents to use, or they simply won't rely on it as a source of information.
Finally, be sure you factor in cost. Paying a web page developer to design a school message board for you can be expensive. Any changes you want to make in the future will cost you more money. There's also a cost to host the school message board on your own server.
Sources for School Message Boards
There are a variety of options for schools that want to set up a school message board. One is to have a web designer create a school web page. The difficulty with this approach is that many pages are in code that can't be easily changed in the future without additional expense. In addition, the school may need someone with enough computer knowledge to create postings to the page. Finally, when you host the school message board on your own server, you're the one responsible when the server goes down and students and parents can't get the information they need.
Another option for teachers is to put class information on an existing site like schoolnotes.com. Teachers can register with the site to post homework assignments. The site is free, but it takes several steps for teachers to create their own page. They must register, login, create the page, and edit their notes. Every time they enter a new assignment, they must remember to save it and notify students. Teachers using a school server are warned that new assignments might not show up until the day after they are posted. Students looking for a classroom page have to go to the homepage, type in their zip code, then choose from all the teachers in that zip code who use the service.
A second problem with a free site like Schoolnotes is that while you don't pay for it, someone does and that someone is advertisers. Recently seen on the Schoolnotes site are ads for car loans, iTunes, and credit monitoring services, among many others. When students link to the school message board to check their homework assignments, you don't want them getting sidetracked into downloading their new favorite song.
A much better option is available as one part of IQity's comprehensive e-learning platform. School districts using the IQity learning management system get a customized message board for every school in the district, plus a classroom message board for every class. Not only can schools use their colors and logos, but teachers can add their picture or other graphics to their own classroom page. Adding announcements for the whole school or for specific classrooms is a matter of typing the message and pressing save. That causes the page to be refreshed and announcements appear immediately. Students can easily tell general school announcements from those by their own teachers because announcements are color-coded.
IQity is a hosted service, meaning that there is nothing for schools to install, no need for special equipment like a server, and nothing to maintain except your own classroom computers. Because IQity is an e-learning solution ideal for both online schools and blended learning situations, students can access their IQity classes, the classroom message board and the school message board from home as well.
Like Schoolnotes, use of IQity is free to school districts, but there are no ads to clutter up the school message board and distract students. And IQity is much more than a school message board. It comes with an extensive Learning Object Repository, an online live interactive classroom webcasting tool and integrated graduation test guide aligned with state standards. To see how your school can use IQity for school announcements and much more, request a demonstration.