Edugeek exclusive!… New Online Reporting product

[Schoolcomms]

This coming Spring we’ll be rolling out our new Online Reporting product, which will be fully integrated with both SIMS and our existing Messaging and Payments products.

 

The Online Reporting product will draw attendance, behaviour, achievement, curriculum timetables, school and personal details from SIMS automatically and make it all available to parents, students and staff on their smartphone or on web. With real time notifications to inform parents when there is something new to look at and keep engagement high. And we are designing it such that a school can be up and running in about an hour, probably more like 15minutes for schools who already use our other products.

 

We have now started development and if people are interested we would like over the next few months to give you an insight into our development process, show you our designs and get your feedback on how to make the product the best it can be.

 

Tim

[Schoolcomms]

Below is an early screenshot of the new main menu of our School Gateway app. This comes from the IOS emulator. We are developing on Android and IOS in parallel but progress is typically a bit faster on IOS (generally easier development environment). The Web/HTML development follows later. Once you have made the tough design decisions on how to fit everything into the screen real estate of the smart phone form factor it’s easier to expand up to full size desktop.

 

 

The user interface is actually a relatively small proportion of total work, much of the work (and value!) is in the SIMS data extraction. So far that is progressing as expected as well. Much of the data we have worked with before on other projects, but behaviour and achievement data is totally new for us. (small question on this - do points totals typically get reset each academic year? term?)

 

One of the big design challenges is how to deal with parents (or staff) with multiple children, potentially at different schools who have different functionality enabled. It’s a relatively small proportion of users, but we want a consistently good experience for all user scenarios. For smartphone we are currently taking the route of selecting a pupil first, then the functionality menu you see above following. With the extra space on web we are still weighing up whether to approach this differently.

[vikpaw]

looks good.

I think different schools will do different things with points. Mostly reset at year end, i'd have thought.

I was thinking with regards to the workflow - you could mimic SIMS and make it circular, so you can go from student to feature available or pick a feature and see which students have it enabled, or does this add a large overhead.?

i would imagine pick student first, as the features will be different by school anyway, different reporting times, different trips requesting money...

[GREED]

I'm still getting over the concept, great idea guys.

 

Be nice to see if you get more customers giving you feedback on the product designs etc on here!

[tombry]

Love it.

 

will fully test it out when/if you all offer it to me like you did the reporting/recording messages stuff last spring.

 

As a school we reset our points totals every year.

 

What I'd really love is for it to notify a parent when their child receives a detention, and then reminds them on the day that their child has a detention - would eliminate a good hour of my day.

[X-13]

The Online Reporting product will draw attendance, behaviour, achievement, curriculum timetables, school and personal details from SIMS

 

JUST SIMS or is it compatible with other systems?

 

We're not a SIMS school, but this looks interesting.

[GREED]

I believe it is only SIMS I would love to see compatability with other MIS solutions too!

[CAM]

No Windows Phone? Live tiles would be perfect for a school app!

[Schoolcomms]

No Windows Phone? Live tiles would be perfect for a school app

 

I'm afraid not at the moment - we would love to do Windows (and Blackberry), but we are developing for three platforms already (Web, IOS, Android), adding more really slows time to market and increases development, maintenance, and customer support cost. If/when the market share on Windows phone increases we'll do it.

 

JUST SIMS or is it compatible with other systems?

 

Much the same answer I am afraid. We are monogamous with SIMS at present due to market share considerations. It means we can offer a more functional product at a lower price and give better quality customer support than we otherwise could if we tried to be all things to all men.

[Edu-IT]

I'm still getting over the concept, great idea guys.

 

Be nice to see if you get more customers giving you feedback on the product designs etc on here!

Is this sarcasm? Without going to off track, what is being delivered here isn't ground breaking. Or am I missing something?

[GREED]

Is this sarcasm? Without going to off track, what is being delivered here isn't ground breaking. Or am I missing something?

 

On a mobile app... For parents... tell me there are loads of offerings like this?

[matt40k]

I'm afraid not at the moment - we would love to do Windows (and Blackberry), but we are developing for three platforms already (Web, IOS, Android), adding more really slows time to market and increases development, maintenance, and customer support cost. If/when the market share on Windows phone increases we'll do it.

 

Thought you'd use something platform agnostic, like Xamarin. Also, Blackberry is dead.

[GREED]

To be fair the rest of the market and other markets are still catching up to include windows phone.

[Edu-IT]

On a mobile app... For parents... tell me there are loads of offerings like this?

No need for a dedicated app if the website is mobile friendly?

[GREED]

No need for a dedicated app if the website is mobile friendly?

 

Agreed... still, how many parent portals are?

[vikpaw]

I rarely find anything that is truly web friendly on a phone. (i)pads are different. I usually end up requesting the desktop site for most that auto detect.

I must say i prefer apps, but it depends on the purpose i suppose. Just logging in to a site could be a pain, whereas the app is easier to tie to a person.

[zag]

Groupcall are also bringing out a parent reports app soon.

 

It will be interesting to see how these 2 apps compare. Its a great idea.

 

TASC insight also runs quite well on an ipad, not tried it on an iPhone yet though.

Edited December 17, 2013 by zag

[Schoolcomms]

Development continues apace. Attached are a few timetable screens. It will show the current week and next week timetable. Students will see their own, parents will see their child(s). Staff will see their own as well. Due to the limited screen real estate it will be a scrollable list of days/sessions rather than the traditional table. It’s easier to reliably get a good look and feel on a list than a table across everything from an “ancient” Android phone to a modern Phablet.

 

 

Interested to get people’s opinions on whether it’s valuable to show the session and room code (show in screen shot one, not in the second). We know we need to change the teacher name to not show full first name, unfortunately the name comes from the MIS as a single string which is a pain. Any other layout thoughts appreciated.

 

The timetable data pulled through is for real from SIMS which is a nice milestone ticked off.

 

The developers are giving all the Schoolcomms staff access to early versions through TestFlight soon. The plan is to have something reliable for showing off at BETT so that means getting all our staff to try and break it between now and then.

[TheScarfedOne]

Break it....that sounds like a challenge for us! Great looking project, look forward to seeing it live

[GREED]

Perhaps a demo site with logins sent to carefully selected individuals to test break and report back

[Schoolcomms]

Perhaps a demo site with logins sent to carefully selected individuals to test break and report back

 

If you wanted to be a "parent" in one of our test schools we could probably do that by the end of next week. You would be able to download the IOS app and have a bit of a play at least.

 

Because of the way Apple locks down the app store, apps in development are rolled out using a thing called TestFlight - basically we have to compile the individual test phones into the application. So if you wanted to do this we would need your email address, mobile phone number, and you would need to install TestFlight on your phone and give us your device ID. Anyone still interested can PM me.

 

As we get further in to development of the website version we can do something easier.

 

Alternatively you can wait until it's finished - we do free fully functional trials of all our products to any school any time

[GREED]

Whatever is easy and helpful! Keep us posted. I'm sure if you develop a standard and easy way for us lot to help test, even if it is as involved as testflight, there are many here who would take that on... but ultimately only if you find it useful.

[Arthur]

we are developing for three platforms already (Web, iOS, Android).

Will your Android app be better than Groupcall's? Their app isn't very nice to look at or use.

 

If/when the market share on Windows phone increases we'll do it.

FWIW, as of last month Windows Phone now accounts for 10.2% of the market in the UK.

[vikpaw]

Will your Android app be better than Groupcall's? Their app isn't very nice to look at or use.

Do you mean their parent app, or Emerge? I thought the Android Emerge was the same as iDevice and i really liked that.

Have yet to see the GC parent app....

[Schoolcomms]

Development has progressed really well over the Christmas/New Year break (our development team don't seem to believe in holidays). Below are a few of the latest screen shots from the app:

 

 

(sorry for the weird student and school names, it's all test data)

 

As you can see we have now got all the notifications working to show when there are new things to look at. We think this is really important - most parents aren't going to bother going in to check for updates every day, so using push notifications to alert them to when they should go and look is a nice use of the smartphone platform.

 

On the back end - all the data is now syncing from SIMS (via our servers) successfully which is great. Not the sexiest part of the project, but vital to get robust and efficient.

 

The IOS version is nearing completion, we have motored on with it to make sure we have something good to show at BETT. Pretty much just Payments to do (Payments is always hard work).

 

We have this on most of our staff's phones and they are giving it a hammering. If anyone else wants to have a go, PM me with your email address and phone number and I will send you instructions on how to get the test version. Would be great to get your feedback.