Engineering

In the summer of 2006, Colt Gill became the first Oregon school superintendent to author a blog as a means to share thoughts about the Bethel School District with its community and start a conversation about current events in the district. The Bethel Blog, hosted by Clarity's TeacherHosting.com, became the backdrop for a conversation about how promising Web technologies could help Bethel School District achieve immediate and future priorities.  Starting in January 2008, Clarity Innovations was asked to help bring a comprehensive Web strategy into focus and undertake the initial work of reinventing their Web site into an entirely new Web platform.  This new Web services platform (to be launched to the public later this year) will give the Bethel School District and its community the flexibility necessary to achieve its strategic objectives.

After helping to launch their new Web site into production in January, we were asked to further enhance their Drupal-powered content management system to support multiple departments with a universal information architecture and editorial workflow.  In addition, we created a robust and supportable Web infrastructure and toolset to keep pace with their long-term needs, conducted an analysis of the strategic value of the Web and how to leverage that for other district initiatives, and delivered a comprehensive set of findings and recommendations for action.

For more than a decade, the Oregon Community College Association (OCCA) has published a printed directory of staff from the 17 community colleges.  Each year, even as the ink dries, corrections are necessary and were costly... Until now.  This year, OCCA hired Clarity Innovations to bring the directory online, making it easy for members to search for peers' contact information, departments, or a list of institutional leaders.

Kentrox desired to make enhancements and additions to its Web site while preserving its current design. Recent staff changes left it without much documentation or internal expertise on how the site was constructed, organized, or configured on the back-end however. Working from a list of desired improvements, Clarity tackled the challenge head-on and was able to publish the changes quickly, provide a means to track and implement additional Web site content requests, and generally fill in as needed until they were able to get back up to speed on managing future changes themselves.

Seeing the rapid growth of their student population in the last decade, Newberg Public Schools realized they needed a better way to foster communication within their internal and external communities. Yet they didn't want to create a bottleneck by requiring everyone to work through a handful of individuals empowered with maintaining the District's Website. What they needed was a tool to enable directors, staff, principals, and teachers the ability to create and publish directly.

Clarity Innovations was the natural partner for customizing a Web-based tool for managing the "community plumbing" necessary to achieve this. We worked closely with a brand identity firm to create a custom look & feel that the District has adopted and integrated the author login to use the District's existing system, so users wouldn't have to learn a new password.

Salem-Keizer School District had a clear plan for what they wanted to achieve with a combination of open source tools.  The tricky part was customizing the tools to cooperate with existing technology infrastructure and serve their desired purpose.  Our extensive experience in creating, deploying and managing technology infrastructures of mixed operating systems, server platforms, networking protocols, and security policies was just the thing Salem-Keizer School District needed to get their open source tools up and running smoothly.

From 2001 through 2005, Clarity provided educational content expertise, content development, educational policy advice and strategy for a Fortune 500 company’s worldwide education initiative. Our services provided them with the valuable "real world" educational expertise to fully enable the initiative to achieve its national and international goal of integration of technology in the classroom and curriculum. The client recognized the competitive advantage of our unique group of educational experts and our ability to provide it with a tailored team-based solution.

Clarity Innovations worked with BoisePaper to multiply the effectiveness of their employees' professional development. While electronic training materials already existed, BoisePaper staff were having difficulty with delivering and tracking the completion of courses. Clarity Innovations provided the expertise and tools necessary to implement an effective and easy to manage means of delivering on-the-job training and tracking the progress of staff through a library of courses.

COSA needed a long-term strategy for supporting their technology infrastructure, not only for the technical issues that may arise from time to time, but also for migrating to new equipment and providing new services to its membership. In 2003, Clarity partnered with COSA to provide technology infrastructure management, telecommunications, technology support services, and professional development.