Google Apps to replace School Fusion?

[Chris]

Our school district uses School Fusion as a communication center.  Last school year, we jumped on board with GAfE.  Has anyone made any type of transition from School Fusion or other type of system like it and created it through GAfE?  I was wondering if it's possible, and what hiccups you went through.  For those unfamiliar with School Fusion, the majority of our teachers use it as a brief biography of themselves, a calendar to share with parents, links to content in their classroom, a class blog, and that's about it.  The big piece of it is that updates made on School Fusion is also shared with all of the parents that are in the email database (a separate than School Fusion's).  If anyone has any input, I'd love to hear it!

[melissa benson]

We escaped from SchoolFusion a few years ago. We were using it as our web site platform along with our parent portal. We moved to Drupal, an open source software. Best decision ever! Granted we have spent money on a great Drupal Development teambut our web site and our portal is awesome. We use google sites and calendars in Google..but we "connect" them within our Drupal site. Development is done in Drupal but Google Calendar feeds, along with other types of feeds are used to flow into the portal. Staff, students and parents all log in via LDAP into Drupal and their connections with their students and student connections with their schedules are done via our SIS and Databases. We have a pretty robust set up which we've put a lot of time and energy into. Not sure if you are in that position.

[Eric Simmons]

We recently switched from rSchoolToday (schoolfusion-equest) to Google Sites for all our school webpages. Teachers are encouraged and support to use Sites, but we simply link out to other sites that they may use instead of Sites. 

I wouldn't say we are starting with an extremely well designed outlay, but functionally it works much better than what we were working with. isd477.org 

Eric Simmons

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Eric Simmons | Director of Technology 

Google Certified Teacher

Princeton Public Schools

763-389-6166 Office

763-389-7253 Instructional Technology Help Desk 

@ersimmons Twitter 

On Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 4:03:15 PM UTC-5, Chris wrote:

[Chris]

Thanks for the great input from both of you!  Open source is definitely the way to go.  I'll look into Drupal as maybe it's something I could pick up.  Melissa, do you have a link to your district's site I can take a look at?  Thanks again!

[Charlie Gerancher I Steckel Elementary School]

Another option if you want to use a content management system would be Joomla. 

Charlie Gerancher | Technology Instructor | Technology Integration Coach | Steckel Elementary School 

 610.435.1521 X3124 | * geran...@whitehallcoplay.org

 

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[Zach Vander Veen]

I'll echo Melissa and Charlie and recommend an opensource option plus various GAFE components. Drupal and Joomla are very solid. I'd add WordPress to the mix. Here's the short framework of what we've done:

• WordPress MultiSite install. Each school in our district is a site. Teachers can get their own site as well.
• Purchased a well maintained (and great looking) theme.
• Added some key plugins like site backups, directories, Google Login (or AD login), Gravity Forms for more robust forms.

You do need to put a bit of time into setup and learning the system. Some money is required (for hosting - although many districts have servers available), theme, etc. But it really is a platform that functions as a kitchen sink. There's a plugin for every possible idea.

IMO, Google Sites leaves much to be desired when it comes to aesthetics (when are they going to upgrade it to match their Material Design philosophy?). Design matters, especially when it's the public face of your district.  

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Zach Vander Veen

Director of Technology

Hamilton City School District

Edlightenment: Thoughts on Education & Technology