SchoolNotes.com Helps Valparaiso, Ind., School District Connect the Classroom and the Home

by Alfred Bredenberg

Every Sunday night, third-grade teacher Sue Hoffman writes a friendly note to her students and their parents, outlining assignments and activities for the coming week. Not an unusual practice for a teacher.

What's unusual is that Hoffman's note doesn't go out via the notoriously unreliable "backpack mail" system common in many schools. Her message, written Sunday night, is available to all families that same evening through an Internet service called SchoolNotes.com.

Hoffman, who teaches at Flint Lake Elementary School in Valparaiso, Ind., is only one of about 30,000 teachers using SchoolNotes.com to bridge the gap between classroom and home. SchoolNotes.com, which is accessed over 2 million times a month by educators, students, and parents, allows teachers to post homework assignments, announcements, vocabulary words, journals, useful Web links, electronic flashcards, and many other kinds of messages. Families can access their teachers' SchoolNotes from their home computers, from work, or from the local library over the Internet.

The best thing about SchoolNotes.com? "It's free!" says Olga Granat, technology trainer for Valparaiso Community Schools. Granat and co-worker Cynthia Svilar have instituted a training program throughout their school district to encourage all their teachers to start using SchoolNotes.com to make the Internet connection between school and home.

As technology trainers, Granat and Svilar do a lot of work with teachers helping them make good use of technology in the classroom. "With technology, we always try to put together purchases that benefit teachers and schools financially," says Granat. As a free service, SchoolNotes.com offers tremendous value. "It doesn't cost the school district anything, and it's a wonderful product -- and it's easy to use," adds Granat.

Supporting Parental Involvement

"Parents want to get involved in their children's education," says Ron Bocinsky, who started SchoolNotes.com in 1997. "SchoolNotes.com is a perfect start for that. It's a way to use technology to get teachers connected to their communities. This is why I developed SchoolNotes.com to begin with."

Bocinsky designed his Web application to be quick and easy to use. To set up a SchoolNotes.com page, a teacher goes to http://SchoolNotes.com and fills out a brief registration form. To create and post notes, a teacher doesn't have to learn HTML (hypertext markup language), the programming language used on the Web. The teacher just types a message in a text box on-screen (or copies it from a word processing or text editor program) and clicks a button to publish the notes to a Web page. Each teacher receives a unique URL, or Web address, which students and parents can use to access that teacher's SchoolNotes from home.

A teacher can also set up recommended Web links and electronic flashcards for students, as well as a link to their email address, so parents and students can easily send email to the teacher right from the SchoolNotes page.

Hoffman uses SchoolNotes.com to point her third-grade students and parents to beneficial Internet resources and sites related to work she's doing with the kids in school. "That's one of the great features of SchoolNotes. [Parents and students] don't have to type in the Web address. They just click on the location and go there."

She also appreciates the link to her email address: "Kids and parents will email me from home. Sometimes in the morning I'll have two or three emails from them -- and that's all right."

Last year, some students of Ann Frederich, who teachers fifth grade at Hayes-Leonard Elementary School in Valparaiso, had forgotten the due date of a project and were late getting their assignments in. They were able to submit them, just under the wire, through the email link on Frederich's SchoolNotes.com page.

As of the beginning of year 2000, about 30,000 teachers had registered with SchoolNotes.com. Bocinsky expects to be up to 100,000 by the end of the 1999-2000 school year. The site receives over 2 million page views a month, a traffic figure that is growing quickly as more schools, teachers, and families come on board.

Hot Trends in the Classroom: Technology and Parental Involvement

The SchoolNotes.com phenomenon parallels a nationwide trend toward increased use of computer and Internet technology in the classroom and in the home.

The Clinton administration has set a goal of having all U.S. public schools and classrooms wired to the Internet in the year 2000. A study released in June 1999 by Market Data Retrieval [http://www.schooldata.com] found considerable progress toward that goal, with 90 percent of public schools having access to the Internet at the building level, 71 percent in the classroom. A November 1999 report from the same organization showed that in more than 50 percent of schools the majority of teachers were using the Internet for instructional purposes. Covering the home front, Nielsen/NetRatings [http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/hot_off.htm] in July 1999 reported 106.3 million Internet users in the U.S., 39.37 percent of the population.

The rapid wiring of schools and homes to the Internet comes at a time when experts are calling for increased involvement of parents in their children's education. A 1996 study by the National Center for Education Statistics [http://nces.ed.gov] found that, when one or both parents were highly involved in school, their children did better in school, were less likely to be suspended or expelled or to repeat a grade, and enjoyed school more.

An Internet application like SchoolNotes.com gives parents a way to be more in touch with what's happening in the classroom, to make sure their children are aware of assignments, to be better prepared to provide help to their children with homework, to be in touch with teachers, and to be informed of special events and activities.

Valparaiso Trains Teachers With SchoolNotes.com

Cynthia Svilar came across SchoolNotes.com at a conference early in 1999. She and fellow trainer Olga Granat liked the simplicity and functionality of SchoolNotes.com and decided to run a pilot test at Valparaiso with a group of volunteer teachers.

"It was all very positive," says Svilar, "so we decided to introduce SchoolNotes to teachers as a tool they could use to stay in touch with students and parents, and to keep aware of what their peers are doing."

Since then, Svilar and Granat have given SchoolNotes.com training to nearly all of Valparaiso Community Schools' 250 teachers. The district has a high school, two middle schools, and eight elementary schools. The trainers visit a building and get together with teachers individually or in small groups of two or three. They spend about a half-hour or 45 minutes explaining and demonstrating SchoolNotes.com, showing how other teachers are using it, and walking the teachers through the simple registration process to set up their own SchoolNotes.com pages.

How Teachers Are Using It

Ann Frederich has been using SchoolNotes.com with her third-graders and parents since spring of 1999. Initially she sent home a note to parents announcing the availability of her SchoolNotes.com page and giving the Web address. "Students started using it right away," she says. "Last year, I got a lot of email from students. This year I'm getting more email from parents. I have seen a real switch this year -- parents seem to access it as much as students."

Frederich uses SchoolNotes.com to post homework assignments and announcements of upcoming activities -- "anything they need to know about what's going on in the classroom." She provides Web links related to what the class is studying. She also posts new vocabulary words. "Kids like that because they can print it out. And parents have a guide to use in helping their kids."

All of Frederich's third-graders have Internet-connected computers at home, except for one student, who uses a computer in the library, lab, or classroom to access SchoolNotes.com.

Other Valparaiso teachers use their SchoolNotes.com pages to post homework assignments, upcoming activities and events, recommended Web sites, skills to be learned in the next week or month, specials scheduled for the week, birthday greetings, field trip announcements, schedules for parent-teacher conferences, course syllabi, spelling words, requests for parent volunteers for activities, and just plain friendly messages. Foreign language teachers use the SchoolNotes.com flashcard feature to post vocabulary words so students can practice with them online. A group of high school students traveling to Spain plans to use SchoolNotes.com as a daily journal so parents and fellow students can follow along on the trip.

Making the Internet a Tool for Education

An application like SchoolNotes.com helps children see the Internet differently. "It teaches the kids that the computer is a tool," says Frederich. "So many of them in elementary school just use it as a way to play games."

Granat agrees. "I value technology for what it can do educationally," she says. "It's nice to see the Internet being used for something good rather than just expensive entertainment."

In this case, the tool can offer powerful benefits in strengthening the connection between home and school, giving busy families an easier way to be involved in the children's education. "Kids at our school are really, really busy," says Frederich. "Their parents have them involved in so many things. They need some way to handle it all." Having SchoolNotes.com available helps students stay organized and keep up with their schoolwork. "It relieves their minds. They're not always worried about 'What am I missing?'"

Strengthening the connection between home and school is critical for learning. "You can never do enough," says Sue Hoffman. "You can put something in a child's hand, but sometimes it gets home and sometimes it doesn't." Hoffman, Frederich, and a growing number of teachers in Valparaiso are relying on SchoolNotes.com to change that. "It's another way of keeping connected," she says.

Because SchoolNotes.com is fast and easy to use, and doesn't require any special programming, it's attractive to teachers as a communication tool. "For teachers, their biggest fear is that this is just one more thing they'll have to do," says Granat. "But many teachers have bought into it and love it. It's a way I can have a presence on the Web with no knowledge of HTML. And the people that do know their HTML can use it as well."

It's a testament to their love of SchoolNotes.com that Cynthia Svilar and Olga Granat have built a district-wide training program out of this simple, free Web application. Why the enthusiasm? "For me, it's just wonderful," says Granat. Svilar laughs. "We always have to start our training sessions by saying we don't work for SchoolNotes!"

"Before, I had wanted to have something like this on our school Web site," says Ann Frederich. "But SchoolNotes is just so much easier to use and faster. I just think it's a really good thing. I have really come to depend on this. I couldn't function without it. I'm that enthusiastic about it. It's the best resource I've had in 20 years."

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Interested in trying out SchoolNotes.com? If you're a teacher, just go to http://SchoolNotes.com. You'll fill out a brief registration form and will be able to start posting your own notes within minutes. If you're a parent or student, visit the SchoolNotes.com Web site and search by ZIP Code to find out whether your school or teacher has a SchoolNotes.com page.

For more information, visit the SchoolNotes.com website at http://www.schoolnotes.com