Today, Janet and I made a small presentation to the PTSO Board at Newton North. Our purpose was to update them specifically on what's happening with respect to the North PTSO website and directory. Our talk covered that and also the NPS? TAC? more generally. Here are the highlights.

NPS TAC 2008-2009 Projects

• Learning (Lead: Shelley Chamberlain)
• Learning Management (Lead: Missy Costello)
• PTO Communications & Directory (Lead: Erik Britt-Webb)
• Overall Communications (Lead: TBD)

PTO/PTSO Communications & Directory – Primary Goals

• Improve information access and collaboration within each PTO through the use of common/shared infrastructure
• Dramatically streamline and improve the sharing of calendar events and news items across the district by enabling district-wide (and multi-school) events/news to be shared in a structured way down to local school PTO websites (via content syndication) and vice-a-versa
• Dramatically streamline and improve how PTO contact directory information is gathered, validated, published and maintained
  • For each PTO
  • Across PTOs for families with children in multiple schools
• Make it easy and secure for appropriate school constituents to interact across a range of Newton school and PTO websites, using a single identity and authentication credentials (rather than having to maintain different ones for NorthPTSO.org, WardPTO.org, NPSTAC.org, etc.)

Pilot Projects

• Being conducted simultaneously at www.NorthPTSO.org, www.WardPTO.org and www.NSPTAC.org.
• Implemented local calendars that are slowly getting populated
• On WardPTO.org, provide an archive of email blasts (coming soon to NorthPTSO)
• Working feverishly on short-term online directory gathering process/tools, while long-term solution is ironed out
• In the next couple of months, looking to tackle the challenge of receiving, editing and organizing content for the NorthPTSO and WardPTO email blasts

Help Needed

• Graphic designer to improve look & feel of these websites
• Technically-minded person who can help configure modules being used to power the functionality of these sites (using the Drupal?.org system, but little to no programming required)

The following message is being distributed through NPS? PTO newsletters. If you have a chance, I recommend that you take the survey too.

To: Newton PTOs

The School Committee has appointed a subcommittee to review system-wide security policies and to make recommendations to the School Committee on how to deal broadly with security issues. That subcommittee has prepared a draft policy and had discussions about how specific security measures then might be implemented. The School Committee is scheduled to vote on the policy in November. This survey is designed to seek community input on some of the areas under discussion. We hope to get a lot of survey responses from PTO members.

Following on the topic of Online Payment Options, I was in another conversation about how to handle the large volume of requests to include community service advertisements in the PTO newsletters. It would be nice if there was a non-intrusive way for community service providers to advertise their services to families through the PTO newsletters AND at the same time, for the PTOs to make a little advertising revenue.

As I was documenting some findings for Online Payment Options, I also discovered the Paypal Node module. Module is designed specifically for taking online micro payments in order to post content to a website (which could then flow into the PTO newsletters). This sounds like a perfect solution for the allowing people to advertise in the school PTO newsletters, while the PTOs make a little coin off the advertisement.

Recently, I've been talking with some fellow PTO technologists about "best practices" in enabling PTOs to accept online payments. Several PTOs have Paypal buttons on their sites that take the visitor to a Paypal page where s/he can make a donation.I'd like to see some better options.

Assuming a PTO website is based on the Drupal? system (as North and Ward now are) here are a few Drupal-based modules that could be useful in the future.

The Ubercart related modules is probably much more than we need at this point. It supports the whole product catalog, in addition to payments. Might be good if we’re selling school apparel and accessories, but too much right now.

The e-Commerce related modules may be better fit. Less focus on managing a product catalog.
 
The fee and donation modules operate on the Simple Paypal Framework module. This could be the simplest way to collect online payments that is at least a little bit integrated into our site.

I’ve been working with the newsletter people at Ward PTO and North PTSO to setup PicasaWeb accounts for collecting images to use in their respective newsletters. I’ve been finding it difficult to USE the images one they’re in the albums. It’s just not as friendly as I had hoped.

So, I’ve been thinking about changing course and suggesting that they turn on the Image Gallery features native to their respective PTO websites. As an example, I have created a couple of image galleries on this site.

I've interacted with the author of this book for the past year. I'm really excited to read the book when it comes out.You can see the post in the Education group on groups.drupal?.org at http://groups.drupal.org/node/14914. 

Bill Fitzgerald, of FunnyMonkey, has written Drupal for Education and E-learning, due out from Packt Publishing in late October. Targeted for Drupal 6, this book covers how to set up community sites to support interactive teaching and learning. This book gives an overview of the functionality of Drupal core, and then gives precise instructions on using CCK, Views 2, Organic Groups, and a range of other contributed modules to extend the functionality of your site.

I just discovered this fascinating 4:30 video, Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us  by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. Similar to the Shift Happens video that many of us have watched as part of NPS Strategic Planning, this one is important because of the enormous cultural/social (anthropological?) trends that it points out and the implications for how we learn and relate to one another - both in and out of the classroom.

For those interested in learning much more about Moodle?, here are a few useful links I've recently come across.

Moodlers - A group on diigo.com for people who use moodle or are interested in using moodle. And here are a few bookmarks within this group

• Moodle eLearning Course Development - A 252 page iPrint book on installing, configuring and getting the most out of Moodle
• Moodle Style Guide
• Moodle Course Resources - some good moodle handouts for 1.8

Moodlers - A group on the Ning Network

There is a community service providers, teachers and IT staff who are developing a pool of resources to support the use of Drupal in Education. I'll write more on this, but I encourage people to explore the Resources tab tab. 

I think the GDO discussion on the Adams 12 Five Star Schools may be particularly useful to our situation.

As you can see from recent activity, the PTO Communications & Directories group on this site has fired up a project that I am calling the PTO Sites & Directories Project. We will be capturing wiki?-style content (e.g., project plans, action items, meeting minutes, research & decisions) in the PTO Communications & Directories collaborative book.

I just posted: PTO Sites & Directories Project Plan and PTO Sites & Directories Meeting 06/30/0 book pages to get things rolling. If you're a member of this group, I invite you to read and edit these pages. Even if you're not a member of this group, anyone is welcome to post comments on the pages if you have useful input or questions.