Some schools today still don’t have a proper digital school communication platform. And we have to ask ourselves, what are they waiting for?
People over a certain age will remember the days when schools sent notes home to parents. Back in my own school days, these notes were often just handed to the kids, some as young as six years old. It’s not hard to imagine the lack of proper communication that always ensued. Notes were frequently either just lost, or sometimes even maliciously withheld by the kids, especially if the note told the parent something the kid didn’t want the parent to know about, like a bad grade or a negative comment on his or her behavior.
Of course, eventually the parents almost always found everything out, but it could take a long time in some cases. And there was lots of incidences of, for example, school closure information not reaching the parents in time, and parents going to drop kids off and winding up stuck with them, or worse.
As long as the school in question is taking proper advantage of cloud-based technologies that are cheap and readily available today (cheaper than the paper used to print so many notes that wound up lost or in trash cans), these should all be things of the past. App and cloud based solutions are the best ways to communicate with parents using technology these days.
It’s not hard to find a good solution for schools that allows alerts and any other important information to be shared with parents easily, and of course allows for the proper communication between teachers and individual parents regarding academic or behavioral issues as they come up so that they can be addressed in a timely manner.
These days, these type of cloud solutions work off an app and offer things previously extremely difficult or even practically impossible for schools to offer. These include things like instantaneous push alerts to all parents, for example. Or uploading map and navigation information for field trips along with itineraries, and allowing contact and even real-time chat in some cases via the app. Or uploading the calendar for the whole year so that every parent has it available whenever they need to consult it. Things like this encourage parent engagement in education and parent and community engagement in schools.
Perhaps the coolest perk of modern cloud-based school solution software is the ability to send out and receive back permission forms electronically via the app. By doing so you are saving the trees, saving a lot of time back and forth and unnecessary effort at the same time, as well as leaving a traceable digital footprint for legal protection.
Truly the modern world with all its problems is incredible, and this type of software is one of the many reasons why.
