Western NY adds digital file-sharing for 41 districts

Western New York Regional Information Center (WNYRIC) provides  provides information and technology services to five regionally based Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) and their component school districts, comprising a quarter of a million students.

Finding ways to support eportfolio initiatives of the member districts has been a recent focus of WNYRIC efforts. Eportfolio initiatives include not only digital file-sharing for students, teachers, and administrators, but also creating electronic portfolios to gauge students' progress from kindergarten through 12th grade.

WNYRIC chose the Schoolwires Synergy digital file-sharing solution because of its ease of use and the fact that it is accessible to users from within the Schoolwires Centricity strategic website and community management platform - which is already in place at 41 WNYRIC districts. Accessing Synergy does not require a separate login; users can access it from within the teacher web pages and other online resources they are already using within Centricity.

 The Synergy solution will be available to all the districts within WNYRIC. Synergy provides administrators, staff and educators a web-based, centralized and secure solution for creating, editing, and sharing content such as documents, files and presentations.
 
"Implementing and accessing Synergy will be easy for our districts that are already successfully using the Centricity platform," said Mary Kovach, coordinator, CSLO/Model Schools, Technology Services, Erie 1 BOCES/WNYRIC. "The flexibility and full functionality of Synergy will enable districts to build electronic portfolios to track the performance of students from kindergarten through 12th grade. They can also use Synergy as a file-sharing application for students to submit their homework and for teachers and administrators to easily store and share resources."

The 41 districts use Centricity to make information and resources more accessible to students, staff and the community. A popular feature is the capability for teachers to create web pages to engage students and their parents in support of student success. The program is designed to work hand-in-hand with digital file-sharing, improve communications and collaboration, enhance efficiency, and encourage broad participation by administrators, teachers, families and students.