Sending Messages to/from Parents/Students?

[stevenr]

We currently use a system called Simply Click. It allows staff to send messages to students/parents, as well as students -> staff and parents ->staff. It's also a sort of portal, with the school calendar, etc. We're less than happy with it due to the number of outages it seems to suffer, as well as it being rather buggy and a bit on the expensive side.

So we're looking for something better...

This is the sort of thing it's used for:
- Parents reporting absent students.
- Admin team sending out the PDF school newsletter.
- General announcements to all parents/students or sub groups (All year 9 parents for example)
- Individual student-teacher communication (questions about coursework, deadlines, etc)
- Students using it to transfer work home.
- Other individual parent<->staff messaging.
- Creation of private groups to allow staff to create say, "10R Chemistry" to send messages just to students of one class

It allows us to restrict who can send to which group (students can't send messages to parents for example).

I've looked at parentmail, but it seems to only be one way (school -> home). With email alone there's the issue of tracking 800ish parental email addresses. The messaging bit is the thing we're struggling to find at the moment. The portal functions would probably fit onto a CMS like joomla/drupal.

Any suggestions of products/services?

Thanks in advance,

StevenR

[CyberNerd]

We use moodle to send email/Instant messaging to students.
The SIMS class-sets are dynamically imported to moodle when a user log in, then teachers can send message to their teaching group. We don't have a solution to mail parents yet.

[Sylv3r]

We use Schoolcomms which ties into our SIMS setup to allow us to TXT / e-mail parents and receive replies back from them.

[tonyd]

For emails to parents etc. why not try a mail merge in word with CSV's of addresses and names exported from SIMS?

[powdarrmonkey]

What MIS do you run?

[stevenr]

We're running SIMS .net

Steven

[shutdownplease]

We use Schoolcomms which ties into our SIMS setup to allow us to TXT / e-mail parents and receive replies back from them.

is schoolcomms allright? we are considering it as well as parentmail and finding it tough to decide between the two (only distinctions are a minor cost differance and sims integration)

[Sylv3r]

is schoolcomms allright? we are considering it as well as parentmail and finding it tough to decide between the two (only distinctions are a minor cost differance and sims integration)

Its OK. It does the job for what we want but we don't use it for alerting parents of attendance issues with students. Its used here more for "School Closures", "Reminder of Parents Evenings" etc.

The use of it alerting parents of absence is something we are looking into, what we didn't want for parents to always just receive negative news through TXT.

Before I would buy any product though, I would try and get as many mobile numbers first so you are not using a product for only small proportion of people.

[faza]

I use Call Parents and Truancy Call both are really good systems.

[MikeFairbrother]

We use Schoolcomms - works a treat and with it being developed by Capita, it always works with SIMS.net haha

[marshharrier]

Schoolcomms developed by Capita ... I don't think you'll find that is correct.

It's a private organisation with a commercial relationship with Capita i.e. they pay Capita to endorse their product!

Not sure I'd ever be happy to buy a product recommended by someone who was 'earning' out of it.

We went with ParentMail across 9 schools. Gives me NO headaches whatsoever and good support too.