By the time teachers and students return to their Waukegan Community Unit School District 60 classrooms in August, a free app will be available to enable them to access school information on their phone, and artificial intelligence will provide answers on the district’s new website.
Josue Cuevas, the district’s associate superintendent of information technology services, said the new website will utilize artificial intelligence to provide answers to any question as long as the information is contained in the database.
“We’ve integrated our website with artificial intelligence, and a chatbot is in the corner to answer questions from the community,” he said. “If the information is in the website, the chatbot will find it.”
Cuevas and his staff plan to launch the new website and the cell phone app available for free acquisition live by July 30, so when the school year starts for students and their families, it will “be a fresh start for the entire community.”
Nick Alatzakis, the district’s communications director and chief of staff, said when the current website was installed in 2019, it was state-of-the-art. Then the coronavirus pandemic changed the way education was done for the next two years.
“Now we have things like the mobile app and AI,” Alatzakis said. “The technology has totally changed. We reached out to the community, and they told us what they needed.”
The entire project will include 24 public websites — a central site and one for each school — a staff intranet, a mobile app, mass communication tools such as text, voice, email and push notifications, the chatbot and two-way communication between staff and parents.
Cuevas said the two-way communications between staff and parents enable families to get secure information online, which they could not do before. It will allow easier but very secure interaction as parents learn information to help their children.
“It gives parents security they did not have before,” he said.
Along with the districtwide website, each school will have its own unique website with its own news feed. Cuevas said the principal will manage the site and decide what to make public.
With both narrow or wide-ranging communication necessary in different situations, Alatzakis said the district is trying to simplify it at the same time. Different elements of the system will now be better connected.
“There will be better integration between social media channels and mass communication tools,” Alatzakis said. “We want everything available within a few clicks. Information will come out in a more consistent way for families. They can get on all platforms simultaneously.”
With the smartphone app, Cuevas said it can be programmed in a variety of ways. A parent with children in different schools can program it to get information for those buildings only, making it more convenient and efficient. Students can program it for sports and other schedules.
Along with having access to all information in the system, Cuevas said the chatbot is multilingual. Besides English and Spanish, it can translate into a variety of other languages.
The estimated cost of the project is $130,000.
