Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:44:00 GMT
The internet is a powerful and cost-effective way to distribute information to a large group of people. This is especially true for schools. A school can post their schedule online where students and parents can get up-to-date information quickly and easily. It is hard to imagine any school not having their own website today with some sort of schedule information on it.
But there have concerns raised recently about who has access to this information. Just as this information is available for viewing by the student body, it is also viewable by those who don’t have the best of intentions. Predators can have easy access to information such as what time school gets out or where a field trip might take place.
Famundo solves this problem by providing multiple layers of permissions (5 layers to be exact) to their online calendar solution, so only those given permission have viewing access.
How does this work? A school creates a Members Group that has a single sign in and password.

This information is distributed to the student body, which can then log in to see their schedules. No one without the sign in and password would be able to view it. A new Members Group can be created every year or as often as necessary.
The default view access for events should be set for All Staff and Members Only, so that going forward, any events will only be viewable by someone who has the correct sign in and password.

For those events that you want viewable by the public, such as a concert or sporting event, can be set on the fly when creating the event.
We would love to hear from you about any ideas or suggestions on ways you have used Famundo to solve problems within your family or organization. Thank you.
Posted in Internet Safety, School, Famundo | Tags calendars, education, privacy, school, student | no comments
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Sun, 22 Apr 2007 21:48:00 GMT

eSchoolNews Online has selected Famundo as their site of the week.
(Famundo) is an event calendar planning system designed to help school leaders spend less time on administration and more time focusing on education. Famundo provides a central calendar hub with an easy-to-read, complete view of everything going on in a school or a specific classroom. Features include a tool for managing the planning, scheduling, and coordination of events; a message board containing notes and reminders; and a centralized library for handling documents, photos, and other information.
eSchoolNews is the world’s most visited ed-tech publication website, according to Amazon.com’s web-ranking service Alexa research, with nearly 350,000 monthly unique visitors who specifically seek ed-tech product information.
Posted in Famundo | Tags school, technology | no comments
Posted by Richard Kuhlenschmidt
Wed, 11 Oct 2006 11:27:00 GMT
There has already been a lot of dicussion in the blogisphere about an article in the Washington Post citing the demise in cursive writing among students.
The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.
When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.
And the reason for this?
Until the 1970s, penmanship was a separate daily lesson through sixth grade, said Dennis Williams, national product manager for Zaner-Bloser Handwriting, the most widely used penmanship curriculum. At its peak in the 1940s and ‘50s, most teachers insisted on as much as two hours a week, but a 2003 Vanderbilt University survey of primary-grade teachers found that most now spend 10 minutes a day or less on the subject. To adapt to this new reality, the Zaner-Bloser method has been changed to a 15-minute daily plan.
When I went to school, we were taught to write in meticulous cursive. Today I write in a combination of cursive, printing and chicken scratch, which sometimes I can barely read.
It is a good article on what may become a lost art. Read the entire article here.
Posted in School | Tags education, school | no comments | no trackbacks