Announcements and important messages system

[Disorder]

OK what we are looking to do is have a news and messages system so that when the kids come into their classroom there can be a list of messages from staff about clubs and that sort of thing up on the interactive whiteboard. Plus the staff need to be able to "easily" write their own messages to be displayed. At the momment we are using a guest book, so the member of staff loads up the site types in their name and message and it is added to the page.

This doesn't work as normally there are more messages than can fit on the page so someone would have to sit their scrolling up and down. So the ideal thing would be a powerpoint slideshow with a different message on each slide that cycles round.

I havent got a hope of getting the staff to make a powerpoint slide for a message so we cant really use that.

So what would you do? I was thinking some kind of website thing with perhaps a simple webform that puts a message in thats automatically generated into some kind of slide show thing. Im not very good with the old web design and coding so dont know how easy this sort of thing would be.

Any help or advice is much appreciated.

[woody]

Did a quick search on google and came up with this link - interesting and maybe you could send a message to find out more: Matthew Dingley's Information System

[StewartKnight]

Why not create a web server that uses a CMS, all the teachers have to do is add to the database the information they wish to cascade. Try e017, it's free, but you need to setup a lamp/wamp server to run it. I'm currently testing it in W2K3 server and Fedora / Apache.

[webman]

Or a forum software like phpBB2 + LDAP. You can then get RSS from this into desktop apps/intranet pages.

[alan-d]

Why not create a web server that uses a CMS, all the teachers have to do is add to the database the information they wish to cascade. Try e017, it's free, but you need to setup a lamp/wamp server to run it. I'm currently testing it in W2K3 server and Fedora / Apache.

That's what we are doing, but using full MySQL and Apache etc with e107 as the Intranet pages.

With e107 you can set a timer for news items to appear and change which helps reduce admin time. You can also grant permissions for staff to make there own announcements.

[mark]

Wordpress is extremely easy to use - you could even use Windows Live Writer with it for staff to update ...then run an rss feed onto a web page - plus embed that into a powerpoint slide if that;s your peferred method.