Judson ISD Parent Center wins a Best in Texas Award from the Center for Digital Government

Technology is a growing industry with an impact in virtually every walk of our modern life.  Education has certainly been affected and Judson ISD's Technology Services has proven to be a leader in innovation among not just public education, but in general public sector applications as well. Judson ISD's Technology Services Department recently was awarded a Best in Texas technology award by the Center For Digital Government. It was a selection as "Best In-House Developed Application," for the district's Parent Center. The Parent Center is an application that keeps parents informed about important areas such as grades, assignments, attendance, library books, discipline, lunch accounts and more.  And it's all in one place that's accessible from multiple devices. 

The popularity of this tool has been growing with usage up across the board for administrators, parents and especially students.  All this was developed in house by the innovative folks from the JISD Technology Services Department. 

This is excerpted from the original blog post by Steve Linscomb at http://www.judsonisd.org/jblog/post.cfm/jisd-techies-earn-best-in-texas-award 

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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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