About Schoolzone

SchoolZone is a new information portal developed by Edmonton Public Schools. As a publicly accessible Web site that provides secure access to school and student information, it serves to enhance the relationship between school and home.

The site also serves to increase functionality for Teachers to plan lessons and collaborate with peers.

SchoolZone will enhance the communication between Parents, Students, Teachers and the school. One of the most influential factors in academic success is parent involvement; parents' participation in their child's education reinforces the importance of education to students. Open and frequent communication between home and school helps to ensure a consistency of expectations and encourages and facilitates parents' involvement in their child's education.

A portal is a Web-based application that is intended to combine information and services in a secure, easy to use, consistent, and personalized way. Users might be familiar with commercial portals such as Yahoo! and MSN.

The Internet provides users with the opportunity to access information at any time, from any computer. With the wide variety of educational resources available online, the task of locating relevant information is becoming more and more time consuming.

A portal combines information and resources into one site, providing a one-stop location for users to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily. As new resources become available, they can easily be added to a portal without the user looking for them elsewhere.

In addition, a portal is a cost effective and efficient way to share information between the home and school. Information is personalized and allows the school to save time and money by reducing paper, mailing and publishing costs.

SchoolZone is available for the use of Edmonton Public Schools' students, their parents or legal guardians and teachers. Students must be registered in a participating school to use SchoolZone.