Choices
Regardless of how teams choose to go about scheduling, our final goal is the same. We want to offer families a choice of conference times, and we want to schedule these in advance.
- Teams at each middle school have the choice to use the Online Scheduler. With the patience of teachers and parents who do choose to try it, we know we will continue to improve upon its efficiency.
Parents who do not have access to the Internet will still be able to schedule a conference time of their choice. The teachers will contact those families directly.
- Teams not participating will continue to use their tried and true scheduling routines. They will send home parent information flyers through students.
A Homegrown Idea
During the 2005-2006 school year, a couple of teams at Central Middle School of Science decided to automate their conference scheduling by using a Yahoo calendar. These tech-savvy teachers devised a system whereby their parents could sign up for conferences through the Internet. The teachers shared their vision with Middle Level Education but also described some of the limitations of the Yahoo calendar. The teachers wondered whether the ASD could produce something similar through its own programmers at Information Technology.
Field Testing
IT accepted the challenge and assigned some programmers to the task. Many meetings and e-mails later, the SLC Online Scheduler became a reality. A huge thank you to Brian Sheridan and Flor Malto, programmers extraordinaire, who helped this come to fruition. Central Middle School of Science seemed like the obvious choice to field test it, and two 8th grade teams in the spring of 2007 stepped forward to try it out. Thanks to the teachers and the parents of Cesium and Nitrogen Teams, we were able to test drive the tool and use their feedback to improve and refine it. Based on the positive feedback from both teachers and parents, Middle Level Education decided to move forward and deploy the revised tool to interested schools this fall.
