Genesee Community Charter School
Website Redesign and Drupal Implementation
Genesee Community Charter School
The Genesee Community Charter School is an Expeditionary Learning School located on the campus of the Rochester Museum & Science Center in Rochester, NY, serving grades kindergarten through six. GCCS is grounded in education fundamentals and focuses on experiential learning, with its core curriculum built around largely off-site expeditions. We teamed with GCCS in the fall of 2007 to create an online experience that would effectively communicate this balance: the uniqueness of the expeditionary education experience, coupled with a strong commitment to fundamentals.
Following our core process from discovery, to design, through multiple revisions with client collaboration, we established a visual direction that reflects the school's mission and values. Art director Ken Woodworth first created wireframes, then design comps, and after several design iterations, semantic XHTML templates. Typography for page titles and dynamic slide-shows were implemented with Flash, using the unobtrusive JavaScript libraries SiFR and SWFObject.
We used Drupal as the Content Management System for GCCS. Senior systems developer Brad Bowman built the backend using a mix of core Drupal functionality, contributed modules, custom blocks, and a heavily customized theme for the distinctly unique look and feel.
The resulting website delivers effective design that reinforces the GCCS brand, a powerful Drupal backend for managing content, and an engaging, rich user experience.
Calendar of Events
The GCCS website uses the contributed calendar module (http://www.drupal.org/project/calendar) to expose various node types within a robust calendar interface. Multi-date events and date ranges are handled via the Custom Content Creation Kit (CCK, http://www.drupal.org/project/cck) and a customized theme. The calendar includes a legend for quickly identifying events of various types, and multiple levels of detail including Year, Month, and Day views.
Teacher-centric Content Management Controls
It was important to GCCS that teachers be given the capability to manage all content related to their classrooms, and that access permissions be restricted to specific teachers and their sphere of responsibility. Unique administrative roles configured in Drupal allow teachers to do just that, granting control over classroom descriptions, teacher profiles, image galleries, newsletters and expeditions, all within the appropriate grade relevant to a particular user account. An additional complication in the project was the unique assignment of teachers to their grade levels: teachers rotate through two grades every two years. The first year, a teacher might teach kindergarten; the second year, the same teacher would teach first grade; the third year, this same teach would be back to kindergarten. This system allows teachers to maintain the same classroom, with the same students, over a two-year period. It was important that teacher admin roles change accordingly to follow this pattern.
Unique, Seamless User Experience
Fluid sideshows, image galleries, content lists and pages; all present in a soft, appealing design. Website administrators have robust tools for content management, and the design promotes the GCCS brand while offering intuitive access to its voluminous information. The overall experience is distinctly unique and not at all technical.
