Last time I mentioned that there were two trends that many school website editors need to address on their home page. In that post, I talked about the use of colors and icons on school calendars. One thing that I did not mention in relation to school calendars is the importance of including all significant school events in the calendar. The events from the main school calendar are automatically included in the calendar of the OCPS mobile app. More importantly, users of the mobile app can select which schools they want to follow (such as the schools their children attend) so that they see a consolidated calendar with the upcoming school events for only those schools. This saves them time from having to cross-check potentially multiple school calendars to see what is coming up.
In a similar fashion, the second trend looks at the way schools post recent news on their home page. If they post news items as originally intended as News Pages under the hidden News page of their school site, a brief summary and image can then automatically appear on the school’s home page in the left column. These items are linked to the individual news page with the complete story and full details. Again the consolidation of these news stories also appears in the OCPS mobile app for those people who subscribe to individual schools. If you post news stories on the home page using plain content portlets, the information in those web parts does not get automatically posted in the OCPS mobile app’s consolidated news.
So how should you create recent news stories for your school if not in standard content portlets? Well, I could go through all the details here, but I’ve already written complete instructions on how to do this and posted it on the intranet at the following address.
How to Use the News Aggregator
This document provides detailed instructions on how Recent News should be added to a school site so that it is automatically pulled into the mobile app’s news section when users subscribe to that particular school.