On Monday, 19th March 2007, we 1ill send a User Notification Letter containing a new Google Apps account for each school, with a standard user ID ” portaladmin.xxx@smjk.edu.my” where xxx indicate the new Google Apps school suffix, previously decided by the SMJK council, for a full list of this Google Apps school suffix, please visit – http://ischool.tv/projects/2007/02/06/smjk-email-service-migration/

The School Principal will handover this User Notification Letter (UNL) to the existing School Portal Administrator or, if there is no existing one, appoints a new School Portal Administrator and passes him/her the letter.

The PDF generated User Notification Letter will contain a temporary School Portal Administrator account, please use the ID and password given in the letter to log into Google Apps’ http://mail.smjk.edu.my, making the necessary first password change and Google Apps Terms-and-Conditions acceptance.

After which, please wait 24th March 2007, Saturday, after we had migrated the new Portal, to log in to the new portal at http://ww.smjk.edu.my to perform the necessary Administrative functions as the School portal Administrator.

If your school already have the Google Apps accounts activated earlier for all teachers, you can simply log into the new portal and assign the School Portal Administrator role.

Apart from the common functionalities of the existing Web portal, which will be ported to the new version, we had also enable all contents in the new Portal to be RSS (Really Simple Syndication) ready, and introduce many of the Web 2.0 features into the new Portal functionalities.

Templates Design

We had made available 20 different template designs in the new Portal, where each school can select their own preferred template design, and can also change the preferred template anytime they like, subjected to certain text and graphics alignment adjustments in various templates.

During the soft launch, all schools will be configured to a single similar template, where every school’s individual site look similar, after which, they will need to log-in and decide their preferred templates and change after the soft-launch.

Only 20 templates were designed for this project, if the school wants their own unique template, they will need to source for their own, where we will provide the needed binding codes to the new template at a separate cost, chargeable to the school.

Multi-Lingual

The new portal is also multi-lingual, where the school can choose to have their preferred language label e.g. English Only, Chinese Only, Malay-Only, English-n-Chinese or Malay-n-Chinese.

Web 2.0 components

We had incorporated some of the Web 2.0 components into the new Portal, schools can now upload both audio and video contents to their schools site, and make them available for subscription through a published RSS feed.

We had also created a Podcast section, where schools can upload their own recorded audio content and posted in their own school site.

With the new TinyMCE editor, school can also include publicly available multimedia content ranging from photos, audio and video contents from sites like YouTube, Google Video and Flickr.

Editing Tools

Individual schools will need to purchase their own software production tools for their multimedia contents productions, including audio & video editing and converting software; if they want to use some of the Web 2.0 features.

Please visit – http://ischool.tv/tools for a list of software recommended

Other Optional Hardware and Equipments

Schools also need to have their own hardware purchased, including a good microphone for audio recording and podcast productions; or digital camera and digital video recorder, for in-house video shooting and production.