Arkansas A+ Schools Network Web Portal

Our Web Portal

Our goal for the A+ Network Web Portal is to develop a web presence that is a live, interactive, knowledge management portal designed for our internal A+ community and a multimedia enriched public website focused on the external community. www.aplusnetwork.org aims to provide a common online forum for conducting learning, research and administration activities and to integrate and customize access to relevant web-accessible information and services relating to the Arkansas A+ Schools Network and the A+ schools community. www.aplusnetwork.org will be a new environment through which announcements to staff and mentors will be delivered, enabling access to information and services from a number of A+ systems and databases, as well as A+ news, events, documents, reports and web pages. www.aplusnetwork.org will provide a variety of self-service work flow processes within environments that integrate information and resources from a multitude of sources. www.aplusnetwork.org will provide tools and a framework within which it will be simpler and quicker to access information, and collaborate with one another within a secure environment, and the tools and services will be available to all members within the A+ network. Within a single portal environment and with consistent branding, sub-portals will be used to accommodate the unique needs of individual A+ Schools and provide services that augment core services.

This portal will offer many potential benefits to the Arkansas A+ Schools Network. Of these, the main benefit is the amalgamation of information delivered to users in a personalized and targeted fashion. Using the new Web 2.0 Standards, the new portal will be able to deliver customized content depending on roles and associations. We will then have an information environment where the portal audience will be consistently updated with pertinent content rather than being required to search for the information they require, enhancing both productivity and the user experience.

Another feature of www.aplusnetwork.org will be new tools to support collaborative working by staff and student groups, online discussion forums and sharing of the authoring and distribution of documents and reports, secure login client resource area, links to valuable education resources, discussion forums, public and private education chat rooms, rss feeds, an online event calendar, and more. The collaboration tools that are part of the portal will enable the A+ Network to provide a more appropriate environment for groups within the network that wish to discuss issues, share documents and accomplish project tasks.

A phased approach to the delivery of services in www.aplusnetwork.org is being taken. The emphasis of this first phase is upon the deployment of the site itself which you are viewing presently, with access to the core services. Once the site is fully deployed, additional services will be progressively available and there will be increasing evolution of the content delivery. The addition of this new portal truly brings the A+ experience into the 21st century.

Portal Designer/Web Architect

Roderick Rowser, ESM Technology Services, Inc.

September 2008
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