MISD increases internet offerings

Following revisions to the McKinney Independent School District’s main webpage, the redesign effort, which the district hopes will provide quicker access to information, has now shifted to individual departments. Recently, the district’s athletic site has been revamped, and the plan is to follow that project with a similar site for fine arts, which is estimated to be complete by Spring Break, and then to begin work on campus sites. Those will start with the elementary schools and then progress to the middle and high school levels, respectively.

Cody Cunningham, Assistant to the Superintendent for Communications, said the goal is to provide web pages that are simple to navigate and provide the information parents are looking for. The new athletic hopes to satisfy that desire with links to schedules and standings, a Fan Zone where photos can be uploaded by the community via Flickr and news links accessed, as well as Sports Talk and Athlete of the Week features.

Sports Talk also airs daily at 11:30 a.m., 6:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. on Time Warner Cable Channel 98 and includes highlights of recent athletic events and game recaps/ event previews from the head coaches of McKinney High, McKinney North and McKinney Boyd teams. The Athlete of the Week, which currently is Lions goalkeeper Connor Davenport, feature puts in focus another goal of the webpage: to praise and share the achievements of student athletes.

According to Cunningham, the current state of the site is just a starting point.

“It’s something we’re going to continue to develop over time,” he said. “It’s something that we will be changing. It’s a work-in-progress, and we’ll continue to add more photos and video and information in the coming weeks.”

The MISD Communications Department provides much of the content currently on the athletics site. To provide more, the department is looking to bring in greater involvement from staff and the community, including parents who want to post photos and video. Before the new sports page was unveiled, members of the athletic department were trained to add to the site, and Cunningham said the district is trying to create simple, dynamic sites that are easy to update.

“We know that the appetite for information is always going to be greater than what one department can provide,” he said. “My department can’t possibly provide all the information that’s needed, but what we can do is empower other departments and the campuses to start populating those themselves.”

Considering the amount of web projects the district is undertaking, it may surprise that it employs only a single web developer. Cunningham compared it to MISD’s total staff and student population: 3,000 employees, nearly 24,000 students, one developer.

“In any other organization in the corporate sector, you would have an entire department dedicated to web development,” he said. “And it’s not something we wouldn’t like to have, it’s just when you’re trying to operate as lean as possible, if we need to decide between a teacher and a web developer, we’re going to go with the teacher.”

That’s why the emphasis on updates from the campus level has such importance. Right now there is an employee at each campus in charge of updating the website, but there are still big disparities between the amounts of content offered.

The redesign hopes to fix that.

“Right now you go from one campus site to another and they’re completely different,” Cunningham said. “Some are updated daily, some aren’t even updated monthly. That’s something that is not acceptable. Our goal is to bring those up to the standard that they need to be at.”

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