With families now receiving more messaging than ever before, from teachers, building principals and district staff, providing a consistent and familiar experience is vital. By posting newsletters and other applicable correspondence directly to your school website as on-page content, district staff can ensure their communications are available to all in a convenient, aesthetically pleasing and accessible way.

While traditionally newsletters have been produced in PDF format, posting this content directly to the web provides a multitude of benefits:

• Translatable – On-page content is translatable using Google Translate, meaning a wider swath of our community can access it.
• Responsive – On-page content works well on both mobile and desktop computers, meaning users won’t have to zoom in to read the text. This is increasingly important as the majority of readers are accessing content on their phones.
• Accessible – On-page content, or HTML, is natively accessible, ensuring users of assistive technologies are able to perceive and enjoy our content.
• Ease of use – Not only is the reader’s experience more familiar, but producing on-page content is easier than producing PDFs. Most content can be written in either Word or Google Docs and then simply copied and pasted onto a page. The Communications and Community Relations Department has put together a blog post demonstrating what content is included when copying and pasting between the different publishing tools.
• Searchable – By posting newsletters directly to a teacher or school webpage, district staff create a comprehensive source of information. Rather than digging through old emails, families can navigate to the newsletter section of your page and catch up on any news they may have missed.

With email fatigue surely on the rise, providing a simplified and predictable avenue of messaging is important for our families. If you are interested in attending an upcoming SchoolMessenger Teacher Webpage training, follow the link below for our next training via PDEnroller, or reach out to the OSD Communications Department with any questions you may have.

OSD Teacher Webpage Training
Thursday, November 19, 2020
5-7 p.m. via Zoom
Sign up via PDEnroller