Is anyone using a Parent Portal at their children's school(s)?

Please tell us a little about it!

On Sunday, I published this post about Parent Portals. This post considered portals from somewhat of a technical perspective, discussing features and looking at the web sites of some applications that provide this kind of functionality. But I am also very interested in the parent’s perspective – are you using parent portals in the schools your children attend, and how is this working out?

If you are a parent and you are using any kind of portal functionality at the schools that your kids go to, please comment and tell us a little about your experience:

What kinds of features do you like the best?
What features would you like to see added to the portal?
What product is being used (if you can tell)?
Any other observations you would like to share

Thanks in advance to any readers who take a few moments to share their insights into Parent Portals as they’re being used in todays schools!

Tags: elementary school web sites for parents, high school web sites for parents, middle school web sites for parents, parent portals, parent teacher portals, parent web sites for schools

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Permalink Reply by Zegna on January 26, 2011 at 5:28pm

A great number parents of our city join parents forum to discuss all problems about children education http://www.jiazhang100.com/forum.php and most parents join the parents group of children's classmate on QQ( a popular tool like MSN in China) ,sometimes we call teacher join us and we can chat with them but most teacher are very busy. kid's education is very important for Chinese parents and they meet many problem. So most of us join the forum to find information ,helping and even just relax. My daughter's school often hold parent's education face to face on Wednesday night but sometimes we did not have time to join. so sometimes I think maybe they can use Elluminate or other tools

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Permalink Reply by Kelly Walsh on January 26, 2011 at 5:59pm

Thanks for the feedback Zegna! The importance Chinese parents place on their children's education is impressive. I'm not surprised to hear that online parent groups are being used as a part of the education process.

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Permalink Reply by Jon Nemeth on January 27, 2011 at 2:18pm

I don't know if this is what your looking for, but Novachi provides (for free) a service that allows parents to see what their kids assignments are, whether or not they have completed them, and what their lesson plan looks like for the week, in addition to being able to read incident reports.

In order for it to work the school, or at least the child's teacher, must be using the program as well. Nice thing is, no matter who is using the program, no one ever has to pay a dime. You can check it out here.