CHIP, which has the entire Choate network “centralized,” is only the begining of the technological revamping Choate can expect in years to come.

When students returned to campus from summer break this year they were greeted online by a new internal Choate website: CHIP, the Choate Information Page.

Replacing the familiar but defunct CampusNet, CHIP now provides the faculty, staff and students who make up the Choate Rosemary Hall community with a single online resource consolidating a wide range of information from course websites and email to weather and dining hall menus.

“Everything has been centralized,” ITS Operations Manager Andrew Speyer told The News. “People can see the menu, weather and daily notices all in one place.”

Approximately three years ago, the decision was made to revamp the main Choate web page, www.choate.edu, as a polished presentation to prospective students and other external viewers.

This project was outsourced to Silverpoint, Inc., a Baltimore-based web-design firm specializing in sites for private K-12 schools, which designed and manages the current Choate site.

According to Mr. Speyer, the hope was initially to create one website, encompassing the need of both Choate visitors and community members.

“The decision was made that everyone would go to www.choate.edu, log in, and be able to access grades, schedules, menus and other information from internal databases.”

This was realized last year with the addition of Student, Faculty, Parent and Alumni portals to the main Choate site. However, according to Speyer, this created a “mess”.

“You couldn’t find the Daily Notice, you couldn’t find the daily menu, you couldn’t find the calendar; you couldn’t find anything.”

Director of Academic Technology and former ITS head Joel Backon agreed that the reception to the portals was not good:

“People complained that it was hard to get in, and even after you got in, there simply wasn’t much that people were interested in.”

In addition to being next to useless, the creation of the portals had thrown CampusNet, the old internal site, into disarray.

As Dean of Academic Affairs Kathleen Wallace said, “There were limitations to what CampusNet was able to do. There were problems with the server…We felt we needed something that would enable us to better communicate with everyone within the Choate community.”

In order to resolve these problems, a taskforce was created in January drawing members from ITS and the Communications Department, including Mr. Speyer and Mr. Backon, along with Mary Verselli, the Director of Communications, and Elizabeth Cullen, the school web manager, among others.

The taskforce faced what was essentially a choice between two options: One option was to commission another website to be designed and maintained by an external company, as had been done with the main Choate page. This would have been costly and cumbersome not only to initially set up, but also to adapt and change as needs developed.

On the other hand, a web page could be designed internally which would allow for easy initial implementation and the ability to rapidly make modifications in-house as necessary. The most logical way in which to create this page was through Blackboard, a web-based software tool aimed at academic applications.

“Blackboard, which we were using as a course management system, had other components to it,” said Speyer. “We expanded Blackboard by adding a community internal web site.”

The Blackboard system which CHIP is based on, the Blackboard Academic Suite, consists of three “systems”: the content system, the community system, and the learning system, which Choate had used in the past. The upgrade to the Academic Suite, therefore required only the purchase of two of the three total systems.

The decision to implement Blackboard was finalized after considerable research throughout last winter and spring, which included detailed evaluation of the internal websites at Andover and at Quinnipiac University, both of which use Blackboard-based sites similar to CHIP.

Overall, the decision to further embrace the online capabilities of the Blackboard package was very well-received among the taskforce, the faculty, and the administration, who approved the launch of a prototype used in focus groups to aid in the development of the CHIP over the spring term.

There were three student, three faculty and two staff focus groups consisting of ten to twelve members each, which worked in conjunction with the Communications and ITS departments to develop the version of CHIP currently online.

It was these focus groups which were largely responsible for the appearance of the site, from the yellow color scheme to the number of tabs to the selection of the moose as the site’s mascot.

Relative to the time it would have taken to create a site externally, the process of creating CHIP progressed exceptionally rapidly, from first being conceived early this year to being online and functional for the entire school community by the start of the school year.

As Mr. Backon noted, “It would have been impossible to do it with another product other than Blackboard.”

However, there are still nagging flaws seemingly inherent to any technological upgrade. “We need feedback from people; we still need to make improvements,” Backon added, “But with Blackboard, it’s very easy to make those changes.”

“We’ve had some hiccoups with account names and passwords,” said Mr. Speyer. “And we’re working to make that function, but overall I think [the transition] has been very positive.”

Indeed, despite some resistance to the change of email clients from FirstClass to Outlook/Exchange, a switch unrelated to CHIP, both the student and faculty response to CHIP has ranged from indifferent to enthusiastic support.

“What I like about CHIP is that everything is in one place,” Jesse Reisner ’08 told The News. “I can log on and see all my courses, the weather and check my email all in one place.”

This is exactly the kind of reception Mr. Backon hoped for when he created his idea of “one-stop shopping”.

“At some point in time,” he said, “You won’t have to go anywhere else to get any Choate-related information.”

The next step for CHIP, beyond working out the initial difficulties and determining which information needs to be displayed most prominently, will most likely be the addition of accounts for parents, who are currently still relegated to using the portals on the main Choate site.

“There is a lot of information on CHIP that parent would like to see,” said Mr. Speyer. “However, there is some debate over whether parents should see the less polished image of the intranet as opposed to the slick, refined presentation of the Choate page.”

As to the content available on CHIP, the capabilities of the web put very few limits on what it might encompass in the future. The site has the ability to support podcasts, video podcasts, and even a “campus pack” add-on which would allow student to create an academic MySpace-style page called a Portfolio, on which academic papers, projects and artwork could be posted.

In fact, with the purchase of additional software from Blackboard, students could use CHIP to manage the finances on their Choate Card, which could be used additionally as a key to dorm rooms, as Blackboard is currently implemented at many major universities and includes that functionality.

As Mrs. Wallace said, “The possibilities within Blackboard are pretty tremendous.”