New Year’s Thoughts from Schools-On-I-Net

Happy New Year! We hope your 2010 is filled with health, happiness and prosperity.

This time is always one of reflection and gratitude and we wanted to take this opportunity to share our thoughts for the new year, including a look back at our journey thus far as well as what 2010 has in store for us. We again thank you for being part of the Schools-On-I-Net client and online community.

Looking back…

In order to really take a look at 2009, we have to start by looking back on 2008 and earlier.
Schools-On-I-Net (SOIN)  grew from an academic community portal (for increasing parent involvement) to a full fledged Online School Management System (for increasing efficiencies within the school) in 3 years time.  3 years time! That is something that our major market competitors (Power School, Blackbaud, etc) accomplished over many many more years.  What’s more, we did it using our own development house and our own financing. We built  SOIN from the ground up – no third party products absorbed into ours, no outside contractors – SOIN is 100% us.¹ We were able to accomplish this feat by working directly with our educators at Yavneh Academy, Yeshivah of Flatbush and Margolin Hebrew Academy / Feinston Yeshiva of the South, to name a few SOIN partner schools that offered their time and worked with us to get what they wanted from an online school management system.

By mid 2008, we decided to concentrate on strengthening our relationships with our clients and put our effort into support and online resources.  We had by then developed most of all the “wish list” features, including a Test Conflict Calendar, Admissions Processing, Bus Management, Online Lunch Management with Online Payments, and other modules…so we spent the year stabilizing and enhancing existing modules, like the Scheduling Module and Parent Teacher Conferences. We decided to integrate with Google Apps for Edu as an option, starting with Gmail to offer Google’s powerful collaborative suite of tools as a compliment to our own comprehensive academic  and community functionality.  We worked with our SOIN administrators to create project guidelines to help users manage things like New School Implementation, Training Roll Out to Faculty and Staff, management of the Parent Teacher Conference Module and Report Cards Module and managing the Academic Year Roll Over.  This way, even SOIN Administrators who were not a part of the technology department could manage the system. Our SOIN Admins’ official titles include:  Executive Director, Middle School Coordinator, Director of Technology, Assistant Principal, Year Book Coordintor and Website Liaison, Office Staff, and so on.  This fact speaks to the sustainability of SOIN in virtually any school.

2009 was a big year for us!

2009 was a smooth year; we enjoyed making existing partnerships even stronger and creating new partnerships along the way.  We appreciate the stories of success that were shared with us.  We  were also able to add new schools to the SOIN Family, having offered single modules for licensing: schools opted for just the grade books, just the report cards or just the parent teacher conference module.

SOIN began working in New York City public schools and we have worked closely with the office of the Chief Information Security Officer at the New York City Department of Education. RK Solutions, LLC,  is on the NYC DOE Famis Vendor Portal.

We had our first school secure e-rate funding for hosted services by SOIN:  Solomon Schechter of North Jersey.

We began discussion of opportunities with a major university graduate school program and two major not-for-profits that work in under-served school communities to bridge the digital divide.

We also became an N-Computing partner and reseller for computer hardware and software in hopes to eventually be a one-stop-shop enabling our schools to  utilize our services for all their technology needs including purchasing printers, ink cartridges, computers, etc.  We would be able to extended the these product offering to parents and teachers to purchase home and office technology supplies while giving back to schools.

We launched simplegrades.com as a way for individual teachers to gain access to a web based grade book and also for schools to pilot the system with a few teachers before purchasing the subscription.

The SOIN Reporter Module was expanded with even more useful reports to allow educators the ability to review attendance, conduct, grade book and other academic information.

Schools-On-I-Net’s FaceBook page reached over 450 fans! Fan us today: facebook.com/schoolsoninet

We offered our first free webinar series: Google Apps for Edu from a Principal’s Point of View, facilitated by Rabbi Steven Penn of Yavneh Academy.  This webinar series is going on now.  Click here to register. More webinars from our educators are in the works.

Phew…talk about a power packed year! And we have more to celebrate looking forward to 2010.

A look ahead to 2010

We are excited about the opportunities 2010 presents.

We launched a new look to our website for the new year.  Check it out here.

Jan 17 – 19: The Jewish Day Schools Conference will give us the opportunity to meet members of our school community in person as well as meet new people.

This month, we will deploy a major release.  This software upgrade addresses OWASP guidelines for security and enhanced administrative functions such as a combined Class Setup with Report Card Management.  More on this release will be announced later.

Also this month, we will be releasing Google Apps Calendar integration with Schools-On-I-Net which means that site users would be able to see a Cal icon on their homepage and view events from all of the school’s google calendars in one place.  This also means that smart phone users will have the ability to synch all school related events with their own personal and professional events.

March 5-6, SOIN will be participating in the Thirteen Conference Celebrating Technology and Learning.

In Summary
Schools-On-I-Net is about relationships and partnerships.  In this economy, people are sticking by what they know and trust; and to that end, we appreciate the love and support of our client schools.  You may view some video testimonials here.

Thank you to our SOIN family of schools:
Yavneh Academy, Yeshivah of Flatbush, Solomon Schechter of North Jersey, Margolin Hebrew Academy / Feinstone Yeshiva of the South, Seattle Hebrew Academy, Krieger Schechter Day School, Torah Day School of Houston, Bornblum Solomon Schechter School of Memphis, Summit Questa Montessori School, Odonnel Middle School, Barkai Yeshiva & Manhattan Day School.

If you are not a member of our client schools, please visit us at the Jewish Day Schools Conference or sign up for an online demo to find out more about Schools-On-I-Net and how we put schools on the Internet.

Whether you are a member of our school communities or not, we would love to hear from you!  Please submit a story about SOIN or about your use of technology in school, any other eco-friendly measure you take in the classroom or any relevant topic you would like to share with us!  Just for sharing, you will receive a Bugged Out for SOIN eco – tote.

¹ Excludes software “components” that are commonly used, like the HTML editor, Spell Check, Photo Uploader Tool, PDF Converter, Crystal Reports, and etc..