The Famundo Blog: Tag school

True Stories - What made us choose Famundo

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:50:00 -0400

What made us choose Famundo as our calendar system? It was the three most important features that Famundo offered us that no other online calendar application system could;

1) Cost – as a school with a limited budget you will be well aware that anything that offers a great service for free is preferred.

2) Integration into our school website. Famundo was the only service we looked at that allowed us to embed the calendar into our website design – (and did not embed with links to external sites not suitable for children)

3) Multiple author addition. We wanted a system that allowed our office staff, headteacher and class teachers to add events themselves, and not rely on a sole user to make all changes.

Simon Widdowson

ICT Coordinator

Porchester Junior School, Nottingham, England

Protecting Student's Privacy Online

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:44:00 -0400

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.

eSchoolNews selects Famundo as site of the week!

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 17:48:00 -0400

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.

Edublog Blogroll

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 15:11:00 -0400

I have been meaning to do this for a long time, so I thought could make this into a weekend project (as I continue to clean up the Parenting Blogroll).

So here is a start, with much more to come, our Edublog Blogroll.

Let me know if you know of any blogs that should be added.

The end of cursive?

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 07:27:00 -0400

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.