The theme of Apps for Schools is complex. Here, we try to simplify it.
By supporting their child's studies and providing additional assistance with homework, parents help their children develop important learning habits at home with additional level of accountability. School apps can provide parents with the information they need to understand the key aspects of school life and curriculum that affect the progress of their children. Older textbooks that litter classrooms up and down the country can sometimes give a slightly biased view on topics, or showcase information that is no longer fully accurate or relevant. Giving students access to up to date and accurate information that showcases different points of view can encourage students to explore all avenues of information and form opinions on the world around them. School apps are the latest technology that aims to bridge the communication gap in education. These innovative teaching apps have revolutionized parent teacher communication as well as student teacher interactions and are bound to be a staple in schools in the years to come. Dynamic reporting, charting and tracking tools found within school management solutions give you a real-time view of everything that’s happening in the school. You can quickly analyse the progress of individual students, groups, classes or year groups to help you strengthen your strategies for change and improvement, to close attainment gaps. Research has found that the most accurate predictor of a student’s achievement in school is not income or social status, but the extent to which that student’s family is able to help their learning. 
While children are growing up in a digital world, advances in technology can make it a challenge for parents and families to keep up. Schools can improve family engagement by offering training and technical assistance on digital tools, online platforms, video conferencing and communication platforms. Being able to communicate, collaborate and provide feedback online to our students can provide them with better science education, based on real-world examples. By developing a mobile-first communication strategy, you can ensure you meet the needs of all parents, regardless of how they access your information. Secondary schools have busy events schedules for students and parents alike, especially around exam periods and times when major decisions must be discussed. Having a calendar of events linked directly to your senior school app can help boost parental engagement , such as letting them know when revision for exams is paramount or when there are additional study sessions being held. As users of Homework App know - a good product is nothing without a great service.
Go Cashless With Integrated School Payments
Notify parents about both good and bad behaviour with a school mobile application. Poor communication is one of the biggest problems between adolescents and adults. People typically spoil the communication process by interjecting barriers into the conversation. Communication barriers are responses that have a negative impact and create roadblocks, which can lead to permanent damage to a relationship. Some schools use social media as a beneficial resource for example to enhance engagement in the classroom, celebrate student's work, or circulate news, activities and events to parents and carers. Schools should always consider the safety implications when using social media with children and young people. Parents, teachers, and students form a partnership linking schoolwork to real life. If parents and carers are juggling all the balls of trying to work remotely, supervise more than one child’s schoolwork, cook, clean, look after relatives and so on, making access to online resources for learning needs to be easy as possible or it simply will not happen. Schools can now consolidate Online School Payments and all other systems into one application.
Parent involvement can be a fun and important part of the school experience. Just as much as teachers should be involved in instruction and learning, so should the parents and/or family members of the students. In order to create more opportunities to welcome and engage parents, we should all work to change our mindset about having parents involved. It’s fair to say that the majority of schools on the most widely used MIS in the UK, do not have any access to analytics. Schools have been limited to running off static attendance reports or trying to make do with some manual calculations in Excel spreadsheets. A modern MIS can do far more than this and it should all be at your fingertips. A School App is designed to save paper, print and admin for all staff. Integrated with the school MIS or used as a stand alone system, digital forms can replace a range of paper forms – photo/video consent, trip attendance and much more Highlighting events and extracurriculars can make your school stand out from the rest. While school and university websites tend to follow the same mold, social media allows you to be more unique and casual. Make sure you have a solid communications plan in place that all your staff members are aware of. This will hopefully prevent staff members across the school being flooded with enquiries from parents and teachers becoming overwhelmed with the sole responsibility of communicating with parents on top of demanding online teaching schedules. A cutting edge product like Websites For Schools helps to consolidate school communications.
Activate Engagement Across Your Community
The skills that schools often value are those that many youth at risk for under achievement do not possess. Help students learn what their intelligence profiles are. Deliver curriculum in ways that provide opportunities for kids to excel in their dominant learning style. MIS systems that can automate escalation actions, such as assigning detentions or notifying senior staff when certain behaviours are recorded, can save staff lots of time. At scale, automatic escalations can allow MATs to make sure their schools are adhering to consistent behaviour policies. Teachers are a big part of a child’s educational experience and successful leadership of a school may well be one of the key things a prospective parent is looking for when choosing their child’s new school. By having your leadership structure and staff transparently laid out on your website, it can reassure prospective parents of who will be teaching their child and who will be in charge. Most school mobile apps provide services such as mass text communication, class and teacher updates, parent conference schedulers, attendance reports, and reminders—to name a few. Forget about lost mail or forgotten emails. Transparency allows parents to be an integral part of the learning process. As a result, learning subjects together can lead to stronger connections through collective learning. A service such as Parents Evening System simplifies the life of a school administrator.
Families should be given the space and should feel comfortable enough to share feedback about their child’s school. Figure out the best platform that works for your community and ask for genuine feedback on how they feel about the school, their involvement in the school community, how they are engaged as parents. School apps help schools engage parents in their community and improve the quality of family support in education. On a well managed, well thought out school website there is no limit to what functionality can be added though and this makes your school website incredibly flexible. For example, if you have a school payments system already set up, it can often be embedded or linked to from the school website. You can check out further insights about Apps for Schools in this Wikipedia link.
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