Student and teacher make a notification system making communication easier Trying to figure out the dates of many of the events at Lee’s Summit High School has not always been so efficient, but recently a system called ‘Red’ has been set up to make things a little easier. “The idea behind it is to take all the schools events and put them all in one place to make it easier for the people who administrate and the people who are looking for the schedules and things like that, to have all that information to be in one centralized location,” Senior Patrick Stoddart. In addition to the event scheduling, Red also has the ability to send out text and email alerts, based on what the person indicates that they want to receive, so that they only receive the alerts that they care about. Red sends out text message reminders about upcoming events, it can also send out text message cancellations, code reds, snow day alerts, among others. It can also do a post to Twitter and Facebook if there are any changes to a club date or anything else. Stoddart made the Red System at the beginning of summer and completed it in time for the 09-10 school year. Red’s design came from a collaboration of past works that Stoddart had created. A lot of the coding for system was just from Stoddart’s creativity. The problem of how LSHS communicated was recognized at the end of last school year. So Stoddart took action to solve the problem quickly. “Last year as web editor of jlabmag, one of the things that when looking at the schools website that I noticed that it really lacked, which is a huge thing, was an event calendar that is standardized and always updated. There really isn’t one anywhere and with a high school that is as big as this, and has as many events as we do, it seems like a really strange thing to not have. So I went to talk to Mrs. Crisafulli who currently manages the schools website and she and I talked about the possibility of putting in an events calendar hosted through jlabmag, so we agreed on that and we and we put up an events calendar. It was really just basic but that is all it was intended to be and it really just showed varsity and JV events and it didn’t show really any away events, C team, it left out a lot of club meetings, and fundraisers, and things, important things that should be on an event calendar but we just didn’t have room for it because it got so crowded.” Personal Finance teacher and manager of school website Vicki Crisafulli and Stoddart started talking again about the possibility of centralizing and taking this problem at hand, where, if an event is canceled or when a new event has to go through the person who writes the bulletin and the person who makes all of the announcements and the person who updates the web page then it has to go to jlabmag to update the event calendar and there is about seven places it has to get updated and still does not do a very good job of informing the students or especially even the parents. So when they saw the problem, their solution was to try to make something that was centralized. Then Crisafulli and Stoddart decided as a bonus to add in the text message and email alerts to enhance the way it communicates with students, parents, and teachers, just anyone who signs up. Right after school got out this summer, Stoddart started making Red Originally, Crisafulli and Stoddart wanted to have students and parents sign up for Red at registration but administration did not approve the use of the system. Administration agreed that having better means of communication was a good idea but they did not want to be liable for any problems that occur with the system. So far this year there have been a few bugs with Red but they are getting worked out. There are already 325 subscribers to Red currently and the growth rate of subscribers is expected to be 10 people per day. Mrs. Crisafulli is excited for the system. “I’m excited about it because students use their cell phones more than they listen to the announcements and I think this is a way to get information that is pertinent to individual students, so that if you’re not a member of the football team you’re not going to get that practice time has been changed message, you are only going to get those messages that pertain to you.” Mrs.Crisafulli said she would tell all of her students to go sign up for Red if she was still a club sponsor for FBLA in order to get out messages and reminders to them quickly. With an organized system, communication between teachers, parents, and students will now be easier. Notifications are waiting.
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