-
Newsroom
NewsroomThu, 03/24/2011School Town Presenting at Education Innovation SummitThu, 07/01/2010School Town Deploys SAS Curriculum Pathways, Professor Garfield in New York SchoolsTue, 06/29/2010School Town Named Best Social Media Platform for Learning by Association of Educational PublishersMon, 06/28/2010School Town - Rookie of the Year as a Best New Education Software CompanyThu, 02/11/2010School Town Featured at Texas Computer Education Association Conference -
Manuals
ManualsTeachers
Parents
Students
-
Concept
ConceptSchoolTown’s Marketplace will be a great place to browse. We suspect you’ll want to do more than just window-shop when you see all the great stuff you can get here. Not only will you find great lesson plans and ideas from other educators, but you’ll find ways to make the business of belonging to a school community easier to manage. Manage your spirit-wear store through SchoolTown's e-commerce platform and eliminate the staff or volunteer hours required to run a store on site. Run all your fund raising activities through SchoolTown, from book fairs to popcorn sales, and eliminate the paperwork and headaches so you have more time to do what you do best - teach.
-
Contact
ContacteMail: info@schooltown.net
Phone: (888) 450-6665
Fax: (888) 862-38451340 Shermer Road
Suite 245
Northbrook, IL 60062 -
Blended eLearning
Blended eLearningSchoolTown makes it easy for teachers to create learning units and exciting media-rich assignments that engage students. K12 education is being renewed with innovation. The old model of teachers lecturing “at” students and students taking notes and reading from textbooks is changing. The tide is turning. Recent studies show that blended learning – combining eLearning with classroom learning – generates better results in student achievement.
An eLearning initiative must be easy to roll out to succeed. It also needs to address the needs of multiple audiences at multiple levels, from students to administrators, from different grade levels and subjects. Sometimes even spanning schools and even district boundaries. The best platforms can integrate and unify digital resources so every teacher, student, and parent is empowered with tools to learn, communicate, and collaborate. Collaboration tools are a must. Finally, it must be affordable.
SchoolTown’s eLearning, collaboration and sharing platform meets all of these requirements and more. Educators learn to use SchoolTown in an hour and are ready to set up digital classrooms, invite students and begin teaching. They can build and share learning units, lessons and assignments. SchoolTown makes it easy to bring eLearning and collaboration to the classroom, school, district, and beyond.
-
Customer Quotes
Customer Quotes“We‘ve collected much valuable content, but it’s like a library after an earthquake. Our challenge is organizing our content and deploying it to our teachers and learners. Unlike other systems, this platform is so easy to use that we can fully utilize all of our great resources with minimal downtime on internal training.”
-- Stan Silverman, Director of Technology Based Learning Systems, NY Institute of Technology“It’s really easy to get started with School Town and the more you use it, the more you love it.”
— Patrick Staley, Teacher, VOISE Academy High School, Chicago, IL“School Town lets me teach twice as much. School Town extends the learning day and allows for students to advance topics from home. The next day we hit the ground running.”
— Tom Samorian, Teacher, Shepard Middle School“School Town looks like a perfect fit for our training needs; we have a constant flow of updates and need to certify that our tech staff is up to date.
— Marty Reader, EVP, Field Solutions Minneapolis, MN“School Town is a paradigm shift from traditional Learning Management Systems to a Student Learning System because it empowers students.”
— Teh-Yuan Wan, Education Technology Director, NY Dept of Education“Our content is all about kids; everything we do is student-focused. School Town is extremely kid-friendly and is the ideal platform for Professor Garfield’s lessons.”
— Bob Levy, Director of the Professor Garfield Foundation“SAS Curriculum Pathways on School Town is an ideal partnership. It combines our award winning content and School Town’s structured environment that encourages interaction.”
— Colleen Jenkins, Education Industry Strategist, SAS Curriculm Pathways“If you’re considering an eLearning environment for your district, school or state/province you
would be remiss if you didn’t check out School Town’s eLearning and Collaboration Platform. It
really is student-centered! And I do believe it really would enhance learning in a powerful and
cogent way! Well done School Town!”
— Timothy Gard, Educator - Media Literacy & Technology, Toronto District School Board -
Benefits
BenefitsSchoolTown is a 21st Century Student Learning Environment
SchoolTown gives teachers and students a variety of tools that makes it easy to personalize learning and engage each student, from anywhere, anytime.SchoolTown connects and unifies educational resources
SchoolTown’s connected platform helps districts leverage their investment in all their learning resources because Schooltown makes it easy for teachers to assign and distribute any content or URL, from any publisher or vendor, into a rich learning experience.SchoolTown makes it easy to create engaging multimedia learning experiences
Like the conductor of a symphony, teachers use SchoolTown to coordinate any digital media and online resource needed to create and individualize instruction—multimedia, files, links, third-party curricula, and more—with just a few clicks of the mouse.SchoolTown empowers teachers
Teachers select which SchoolTown applications are used for their class from popular web tools like chat, discussion boards, messaging, curricular links, and SchoolTown’s unique media library.SchoolTown fosters data-driven decision-making
Teachers and administrators use SchoolTown to collect local data and monitor individual and group learning with real-time progress reports and performance graphs so that they can make decisions about learners and take action to personalize instruction.SchoolTown builds strong home-school connections
Without any additional teacher effort, parents can log in to see their child’s assignments, announcements, performance, and teacher comments from home, office, or while traveling.SchoolTown enables dynamic 21st century learning communities
With SchoolTown you can easily create and manage learning communities to deliver shared educational experiences within a classroom or across a district. -
Collaboration
CollaborationSchoolTown has won awards for our innovation in collaboration and its potential to impact student achievement. When learners collaborate, they are empowered to take responsibility for their own education, and they develop vital 21st century skills.
In SchoolTown, it’s easy for teachers to collaborate with students, parents, other educators, and to set up environments where students collaborate with each other. SchoolTown’s multitude of communication tools enables teachers and learners to work together in real time, or on their own time, from anywhere. These tools include:
- Secure chat rooms
- Discussion groups
- Messages
- Announcements
- Calendar
- Event planning
- Goal setting
Plus, SchoolTown allows teachers to monitor and provide feedback on students’ collaborations. This helps keep kids safe and moving in the right direction.
-
Professional Learning Communities
Professional Learning CommunitiesFoster relationships between teachers in different buildings and leverage master teacher knowledge. Unlike other platforms where your only choice is to purchase off the shelf content, SchoolTown lets you empower your resources for District generated materials lead by your master teachers. The literature on professional learning communities repeatedly highlight these five attributes:
1. Supportive and shared leadership
2. Collective creativity
3. Shared values and vision
4. Supportive conditions
5. Shared personal practiceWe offer packaged courses from renowned experts like Meg Ormiston but the real power comes from our easy to use authoring tools that empower your teachers to create learning modules of their own on any topic. Your learning communities can connect teachers in different buildings or other groupings. Isn't it time to leverage your own experts, administrators, instructional leaders, teachers, and outside authorities so your district becomes efficient and effective.
What's more, each teacher's personal learning plan and accomplishments can be monitored.
-
FAQs
FAQsGeneral
How often can I access my site?
School Town can be accessed 24/7 as many times as you like and make changes to your information, upload or download information or date, and manage your preferences. You may also access your information online; just sign in and open your documents, pictures, music or videos. You may also messages, Chat or use any of the Calendaring or Task functions as often as you like.
How secure is my information?
School Town uses the widely acclaimed encryption model from VeriSign and makes updates as new technology is developed. Your information is secured using 128 AES Encryption technology as used by many fortune 500 companies. The connections are encrypted with a VeriSign secure socket layer (SSL) and secondly with 128 bit encryption, and this is on top of the password protected directories and file system. Password and log in information is independently maintained. Your account is backed up on a daily incremental basis and weekly full back up using third party services.
Will my Information be released to outside sources?
School Town will never release your personal information. We use PayPal third party credit card processor via a secured link from our website. We do not release names of participants or sell to mailing lists.
I forgot my password, what do I do?
- On the login screen click on the "Forgot your password?" link located below the "Login" and "Register" buttons.
- You'll be asked to enter your Username and then click on "Submit"
- If you've created a secret question/answer in your profile, you'll be asked that secret question. Type in your answer and click "submit". Your password will display on the screen.
- If you don't have a secret question/answer setup in their profile click on the "Need more help?" link. You'll be presented with a form to fill in with the name of one of their teachers.
- The form is sent to us, we then send the password in an email to the teacher listed on the form.
Managing Your Group or Class
How do I create an announcement?
Click on your class or group under the School, Activities, Sports, or Family tab. In the Group Tools section click on the Announcement Icon. Fill in the Subject line, annoucement text, and click on submit.
How do I create an assignment?
Click on your class under the School tab. In your class To-Do window click on the down arrow and select Add To-Do.
How do I invite members to my group?
Inviting members to your group is a snap. Click on your class or group under the School, Activities, or Sports tab. In the Group Tools section click on the "Your Class", "Group Members", or "My Team" icon. Click on the down arrowin the upper right of the pop-up window and select "Invite".
We provide a couple of ways to invite members (Manual or by sending an email link).
Manual Method:
1. Click on the Your Class (or Group Members, Your Team, etc...), the member screen opens, click on the down arrow and select "Invite"
2. In the Invite screen scroll down to the "Manual" section, select a role for your new member(s) and click on the “Submit” button.
3. An e-mail will be sent to you with a group “token” which your members will use when they join your room. The e-mail will also contain instructions for your members on how to join your group.
4. Once you receive the e-mail, you can either forward the e-mail on to those who are inviting or print out the e-mail and give it to them directly.
Email Method:
Just provide the email address(es) of the individual(s) your inviting to your group and click on "Submit". An email will be sent to each individual with a link to join your group.
I want to create my own groups, what do I have to do?
In order to create groups you will have to be registered in School Town as an "educator" or a "premium" member. If you have not registered yet, click on the "Register Now" link at the top of this website. If your already a registered member of School Town, sign in to School Town as you normally do then click on the "Upgrade Membership" link at the top of the page.
To create a group, after loging into School Town To click on the "Create a Group" link at the top of the page. In the Create a Group screen, type in the what you want to call your group, then select the group type (School, Activity, sports, family). Based on which group type you select you'll be asked to enter some additional demographic information. Once you click on the submit button your group will have been created under the appropriate group type tab. That's it!
Parent Questions
How do I manage email notifications?
School Town allows you to use your email system for notifications of School Town events. You can easily adjust which events trigger an email being sent in the your personal profile located at the top of the screen. Just check the boxes to control notifications
Subscriptions
What if I wish to discontinue service?
If you decide to discontinue your participation, simply notify us of your intention. You have 30 days to print, download, or save your information. We will then delete your account and send you verification. We can delete your files within 24 hours upon your request.
How do I cancel subscription payments?
You may cancel your subscription at any time. To discontinue the recurring billing send an email to support@schooltown.net with your request.
Can anyone else see my information?
Once you activate your site, you are the only person with access to the files using the ‘Log in’ and ‘Password’. School Town allows members of the groups you create or join to view certain information. In this way you can build your own private social network. However, your information is never visible unauthorized guests.
How do I pay?
Secure payments are made using PayPal with a credit card or PayPal account. A PayPal account is not required. PayPal will bill your card each month until you cancel.
