What we've learned so far:

It's been three and a half months since we launched Newschoolyard at NAIS, and here's what we've learned thus far:

The best new school web content we've seen has been generated from within, employing both a toolbox and an aesthetic that are bound by an uncluttered sophistication. The technologies driving such content may be complex but their information architecture is never complicated. Indeed our view here at Newschoolyard is that simplicity and sophistication somehow became separated from one another in our industry; in our previous incarnation as Old Schoolyard, we were agents of this separation. Not anymore.

Over the summer we will deploy our first sites for Hawaii Preparatory Academy (HI), Nantucket New School (MA), Redwood Day School (CA) and Soundview Prep (NY). We are very excited to see the work of the past several months taking shape. Drupal has allowed us to do within months work that would otherwise have taken years. It is not complicated, although it certainly can be complex, and we believe the principal distinction between these two characteristics is that the former is where our industry has been and the latter is where it is going.

No two schools are the same, although there is a vast sea of same-ness within school websites. This is understandable as there is an almost universal requirements list of independent school website content--whether you are a school of 90 students in the Sierra mountains, or a school with 1,000 students in New York, you need to describe your curriculum. So where is the opportunity to differentiate? It seems pretty clear to us that the mashup is where it's at. Internally generated content, cleanly presented in one place to engage all sorts of audiences and keep them coming back. That the technologies behind such solutions are complex doesn't even matter, especially in an extremely affordable open source environment, because the content itself is easily accessed and authored. This is where the individual stories of schools are being most vividly narrated.

Uncluttered sophistication indeed. Nothing fancy.

We are looking through such a lens with every module we incorporate into the Newschoolyard system. For now, we can't point you to exemplary work from our portfolio as our sites are works in progress. We do think that the following two school mashups are among the best content we've ever seen in our 15 years in this business, and once our sites are up and running, and our schools have been able to populate their mashups internally, we will hopefully come back to this blog post to supplement this short list with a link or two of our own.

The Northfield Mount Hermon mashup, NMHBook
The NMH site is by mStoner

http://www.nmhschool.org/nmhbook

The Beaver Country Day School BCDS Mashup
The BCDS site is by Whipple Hill, and the Mashup is an open source WordPress solution by Wicketpixie

http://www.bcdsmashup.org/