Academy Parents

The new AcademyAS.org site is up — so, this site will go dark after this week. Excellent that they are using Wordpress and Zimbra technologies at their new hosting provider — I’m a huge fan of both. Congratulations!

Why am I doing this? Well, generally there is a lack of interest. The traffic and updates have steadily declined to nothing after Island Affair. Secondly, I am not convinced that this site will be needed now that the new Academy site has launched and is capable of providing the informational features of this site.

I do have a couple of suggestions before I close this down. I make these suggestions in a complete vacuum because I am not on the inside of what goes on at the school. Take them purely as my opinions.

• Please take Kid’s Mail electronic. If a print copy is required, charge for it. Imagine for just a second that all that paper that comes home over the year to all of the parents wasn’t put into your child’s folder! Save the paper. Save the money. Save the time involved in putting folders together.
• Develop a portal for teachers, parents, and students — in that order — that allows bidirectional communication. If a parent could log into a portal and they register their cell phone or email address with the site; how fantastic would be to get a text message or email that a project is coming do, or a visitor to the school will be here tomorrow, or daily notifications that the next step in the science fair is coming due?  How awesome would it be to login to the portal and see the existing “Kids Mail” postings, current and present, as well as the change posted 10 minutes after school was let out? All of these capabilities are very possible with the technology the Academy web site runs on now.
• Form a technology committee from parental techies. It should comprise 4-5 technologically savvy individuals with varying degrees of experience in MS Office or Open Office, web technologies, hardware and software maintenance, security, and license maintenance.
• Computers are hard.  Parents and faculty must educate themselves to keep up with their kids and that education process can be difficult on your own. If you know how send email with a photo, search for information that you can actually use on Google, create and print a document, I am probably not talking to you. If not, sitting down with your child and have them teach you how to do those things might be a fun summer project. (I want to thank Ms. Newcomb for teaching my child home row keys. He’s doing something at seven that I could not until a teacher made me take two years of typing starting my junior year of high school.  Thanks Mrs. Theis.)

I appreciate greatly the help and information I have received from the front office as well as the words of encouragement from several parents.

If the gaining PA thinks they have a use for a website, please don’t hesitate to contact me.  I will be happy to guide you in maintaining the site.  The email aliases and accounts are still active and should be maintained, in my opinion at a minimum as aliases to your personal email addresse.  For example, president at academyparents.org forwards to jdoe at gulftel.com.

After this week, I will have this site redirect to the school site.

This website has moved and I talk more about it on Wireless Hobo.

Lisa Floyd sent me Island Affair Newsletter with results from the event.  You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read this PDF.

Additionally, all parents on our email mailing lists would receive a link from academyparents.org asking them to fill out a brief survey; but we are experiencing technical difficulties tonight with the survey mechanism.  We will try to spam email you the surveys as soon as possible

The backend software that drives this web site has been upgraded tonight.  I have seen no errors in the site, but if you should see one, please drop me a line at webmaster at academyparents.org.  Thanks.

I put up a few Island Affair photos.

In the menu above you will see a new Photos section. The photos are physically on Google, but integrated nicely into this website.

Island Affair is on Saturday and I wanted to post a reminder about that huge $2500 raffle and make sure that you have purchased your tickets because I hear they are going fast!  Also, event tickets are moving quickly, so make sure you have yours!  See the front office or call 251.955.5211 today!

This piece was on display in the front office today. Ladies and gentlemen, start your checkbooks! Gulf Shores Civic Center on March 8th!