Classroom Panic - One Way Messaging

[andymellor]

Hi All,

I'm after a solution that we can roll out to teacher stations in classrooms that will act as a sort of Panic button that will send an alert to the School Office, who will in turn get the member of SLT who is 'on-call' to visit the classroom.

I know the simple answer would be to send an email, but this would mean a member of office staff would be responsible for continually monitoring their email in an already overly busy office. An ideal solution would be for the teacher to send an alert with a few brief details, and then the PC in the office sounding some kind of alarm (be it through the speakers or through the mainboard speaker) and displaying the details.

We had a facility that was part of our Bromcom system that allowed us to do this but it seemed a bit hit and miss; sometimes it was reliable and others not really working at all.

Does anybody know of anything or currently using anything similiar?

I am open to suggestions.

Many Thanks

andymellor

[Mcshammer_dj]

if you have SIMs then you can use this to send an alert regarding a particular child

[gshaikh]

if you have SIMs then you can use this to send an alert regarding a particular child

How do you do that then?

[OutToLunch]

... Low tech - enable Messenger service, give staff a GUI for it, message will always pop up on top on the office PCs?

Solution #2 - give them a separate email address for emergency alerts, set the client up to play a long loud wav when new mail is received on this account.

[Edu-IT]

if you have SIMs then you can use this to send an alert regarding a particular child

Interesting. Where's that then?

[dinsyboy]

Hello - we use a system called epigeon (by a company called Tech Noel - yeah exactly - who are they!?!!) Anyway, we used to use a day book which had messages & alerts etc. but often staff missed this due to being on yard, in the staffroom, on the loo...We looked into a really simple instant messaging/paging software system that would sit in front of all windows until clicked and was customisable (colour, size, font) with sound alerts too (which are also customisable via MP3s).

Once we'd found epigeon it just seemed to work fine within our system - it is a bit of a funky interface (but that's just me being a bit of a Mac snob though really!) During a recent update, some of the clients were failing to connect to the epigeon server due to a mismatch of installs to license ratio and the general consensus was that people could not operate without it...it is a highly recommended product, not for whistles and bells and how it looks but because it just does the one job actually quite well and a school we couldn't live without it now.

Hope that helps!
Regards,
L. Dinsdale
AST Primary ICT (Sefton)
ICT Co-ordinator,
English Martyrs Primary School
English Martyrs Catholic Primary School, Liverpool, UK-

[DrPerceptron]

The sims thing is part of the November upgrade... Focus > Alerts ?

Love the SupportNet area, don't have the november version to try though... or you have to set it up...

[FN-GM]

One option would be setup a .VBS script that would send an e-mail to the distribution group. In the recipients Outlook setup a rule so when a message is sent to the distribution group it makes a sound, change it to something suitable.

[Edu-IT]

The sims thing is part of the November upgrade... Focus > Alerts ?

Love the SupportNet area, don't have the november version to try though... or you have to set it up...

I'll have to take a look at this tomorrow. Sounds an interesting feature!

[forcryingoutloud]

We're rolling out a messenger system based on OpenFire and Spark - Bit of overkill if all you want is one way messaging, but we really like the other features it gives you (plus if you really want you can customise it to match the school's logo etc.)

[MGSTech]

What about this thread?

Panic Button!

Steve

[Rebecca_H]

Hi there.

Just to say NetSupport offer an on screen instant messaging/alerting package if it is of interest. You can download a free evaluation for 30 days (to use on 50 pcs) here:

NetSupport Notify - Desktop Alerting and Notification Solution

You can create groups (that can contain one person if you wanted it to) and only send to people in those groups if needs be. It also has audible alerts.

Hope this helps.

Rebecca