Web innovation in government and education?

On Friday I had the pleasure of spending time with a very interesting and exciting group of web innovators.  No I did not spend a day the Googleplex or at Twitter.  I got to spend time with the winner of the DigitalEducation Achievement Awards and the Digital Government Achievement Awards.  People might think that government and education are the backwaters of innovative web services; they would be wrong.  There is a lot of talent and innovative use of web services at all levels of government and education.

The overarching message I took away from talking with fellow award winners was that all of us should be looking at providing data for our customers in formats friendly to their consumption devices.  The talk was all about responsive web design, allowing web content to work regardless of device of the end user.  The other take away was that our customers, who in our case are students and parents, want data immediately.  Long gone should be the days when a parent finds out that their student is doing poorly in a class, at which time it is way too late to work on helping them increase the grade.

I urge you to take some time (or have your school or district web gurus do so) to look at the award winners linked above. They have some truly innovative apps and web sites, which we can all use as ideas to help us improve what our parents and students are demanding.

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