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In his February State-of-the-State address, Governor Rod Blagojevich announced a proclamation calling on all Illinois schools to adopt the national Parent Teacher Association's (PTA) standards for parental involvement in an effort to ensure that communication between home and school is frequent and meaningful. To assist schools in meeting the PTA standards, Governor Blagojevich called upon the ICN to lead the development of a web-based system that enables parents to access information about their children's classroom activities, homework, and attendance records.
To meet this challenge, the ICN has partnered with the Center for the Application
of Information Technologies (C.A.I.T.) at Western Illinois University for application
development and the Center for the Study of Educational Policy at Illinois State
University to research and analyze the needs of the schools and parents.
The Illinois School to Home Communication Toolkit will provide educators with a resource designed to bridge the gap and improve communication between the classroom and the home. The Toolkit includes a web-accessible grade book, attendance system, message board, and email tool which will allow parents to monitor homework assignments, track student performance and communicate with the teacher.
Parents of children in participating institutions will be able to view the progress of their children in each class. They will be able to see grades for individual assignments as well as track the cumulative grade, view comments about a particular assignment, and view current and future class assignments.
During the past few months, the Center for the Study of Education Policy has conducted focus group sessions with parents and teachers throughout the state in addition to surveying principals, teachers, and technology coordinators. A report of the findings for the initiative will be provided to the Governor's office in January 2004.
The Toolkit will be tested in a limited number of schools beginning in January with a full-scale deployment in Fall 2004. The program is voluntary and will be provided to Illinois K-12 institutions at no cost. For more information, please contact Ralph Lucia with the ICN at 217.557.6552.