SchoolRack is a resource for grade school and high school teachers to create their own websites where they can communicate and interact with their students and those students’ parents.
The sites are colorful and provide a range of opportunities for interaction, including discussion forums, blogs, mailing lists, groups, assignments, and more, all presented through colorful and customizable templates.
Company rep Artia Moghbel emailed up today, saying that SchoolRack was originally intended as “a simple content management system for teachers.
“Recently, though, we’ve added dynamic features to the website, including discussion boards, online assignment collection, and more. With these new features, we hope to make the process of teaching and learning a two-way dynamic with students/parents and want to encourage new, creative ways to teach inside and outside the classroom. Recently, we passed the 35,000 user mark and are now growing at a steady rate.”
The latest release of SchoolRack, announced yesterday, includes student and parent accounts for access to discussion boards, private messaging, assignment collection, and more, a new blog post editor, a simple calendar tool, and a greater range of website templates.
We created a site quickly and found the CMS to be intuitive and simple. The features are just what we would imagine teachers would want and would make a great addition of technology to the classroom – one that could simplify the many processes involved in teaching without bringing too much digital clutter along with it. The discussion boards and mailing list signup in particular are brilliant features for streamlining parent/teacher communication and cooperation.
We did wish that adding files to blog posts was simpler; right now, uploading images or other media requires a separate step in another part of the CMS. It’d also be nice to have a better tool to get audio onto the sites.We enjoyed the calendar, but we think it should have more tools and be more interactive and collaborative. And we’d eventually like to see more integration with existing online tools or networks, both educational and social. But SchoolRack has shown a track record of positive changes to make their tools both powerful and user-friendly, and we look forward to seeing what they bring to the table next.
