Supporting Statewide Education Initiatives

The Regents Research Fund (RRF) supports the New York State Board of Regents and the New York State Education Department (NYSED) with critical research and analysis, and extra capacity to deal with special projects.

Delivering Resources Teachers Need

As part of a larger, national initiative to standardize curricula across 50 states – the Common Core States Standards Initiative – RRF was tasked with developing a website to deliver training and implementation resources to several distinct audiences of educators.  With hundreds of resources – encompassing a variety of topics, grade levels, subject areas and media types – RRF needed an approach that would give their users every opportunity to find what they need.

With this goal in mind, we developed an AJAX-powered, filterable resource view that allows educators to drill down in multiple taxonomies at once, without resorting to onerous page-loads and complex hierarchies.  For search-minded users, we implemented a custom Google Site Search tool, scoped to search not only resource description pages, but the resources themselves.

By leveraging out-of-the-box WordPress functionality, including Custom Post Types and Taxonomies, we also made this solution easy to administer, and stable in the face of future upgrades to the platform.

Branding from Scratch

In addition to powerful filtering and user interactions, the site needed a name, a brand identity, and of course a visual design.  We worked with RRF to name, brand and design the site on an extremely tight timeframe – going from a concept, to a complete identity in just a few weeks.

Enabling Positive Change in Public Schools

NYSED’s ambitious reform agenda is designed to transform Pre-K through 12 education in the state of New York.  Our team was proud to have worked with RRF to further this goal, and we hope the EngageNY.org website will prove indispensible for educators in the field.