Improving Parent-Teacher Communication Through RSS

A lot of the buzz around RSS has to do with its usage by publishers, media companies and enterprises, but it's a technology that also is improving the way communication takes place within other industries. One of those is the education sector, specifically K-12 schools. A great example is the work we are doing with a company called DirectoryXpress, a partnership we announced this morning.

Their application, called MyInfoPage, is in use at several high schools, including two in Jacksonville, FL and one in Philadelphia. It's really revolutionizing the way that school staff and teachers are communicating with parents and students. It allows educators to create personalized information pages that re continually updated with school information such as classroom news, homework assignments, syllabi, closures, sports schedules and monthly lunch menus. The NewsGator Private Label Platform does the work on the back-end delivering the content to pages and providing a way for students and parents to add feeds, but the nice thing is that they don't need to understand RSS or know how to use an aggregator to take advantage of this.

"It is an invaluable, easy-to-use system that doesn't require a steep learning curve," said Dawn Huskey, media instructor at Holy Family Catholic School. "MyInfoPage has enhanced communications between our families and our faculty making us a united force in the educational process for our students."

The schools also can use the sites to make money through search and affiliate programs and uptake has been tremendous. More than 50% of parents from Holy Family  have signed up and created personalized pages since the site rolled out a few weeks ago. Look for additional schools to be added on every month.

It's applications like these that demonstrate the true power of RSS as a game-changing technology.

Comments

[Brett Suchor]

The application of RSS for schools is intriguing and most needed. Eliminating paper schedules, teacher notes, and the I forgot my homework assignment would be fantastic for kids of all ages. It imperative that we create cost effective simple solutions like this for the classroom teacher who in some cases may still be struggling to get an e-mail address.