Text Messaging System.

[AIOMG]

Hello, I'm looking for some advice if anyone can help?

 

We currently use Parent Pay to send absence texts home to our students who are have N's (no reason provided for absence) and it is not very user friendly. It's clunky, snaggy and often needs a lot of patches to sync data from SIMS.

 

 

My line manager has asked me to look into other options, I was thinking perhaps SIMS InTouch or Keep Kids Safe, but I haven't had any experience or these.

 

As the person responsible for attendance improvement I need to know that whatever we use is fit for purpose and ideally I'd like parents to have to option to text back to provide a reason for absence as with a high proportion of pupil premium students our parents often say they don't have credit to call the school but do get free texts.

 

So, has anyone used InTouch or KKS? Is there a massive cost difference? Is there another program that might also be useful? We have 985 students on roll if that helps, and we will also want to send texts about homework, detentions, etc.

 

Thanks in advance

[synaesthesia]

Keep Kids Safe (which is actually now renamed to something else, can't remember what!) is rather good. We've been using Schoolcomms up until now and found that actually rather good but the KKS one is better still & more featureful.

[forkies]

We moved from KKS to groupcall...

[mattstevenson2005]

We are a champion school for RSConnected (KKS) we use their My Ed smartphone app, it is fantastic and provides a messaging system for the school to parent communications, it also provides access to their child's data directly from the app. Would definitely recommend their solution.

 

Matt

[Lippy]

We use Groupcall's TruencyCall (which texts if kids are absent) and CallParents (used to send texts about detentions, snow days, reminders etc). We also use their 'text message in' which allows parents to text us. They are all online-based and link to Sims and work pretty well.

Lots of schools use ParentMail which I believe can do similar, but I've not tried

[bossman]

We use KKS and have done for around 5 years, not had a single problem, their MIS integration tool is so simple to install and it just does the rest. Our attendance officer loves it.

 

And its pricing is also very good.

[sparkeh]

@Schoolcomms has always worked very well for us

[HPlum78]

R Pi connected to a mobile phone, a bit of PowerShell and some SQL Select statements to get the data and format the mail and then throw it at the R Pi SMS gateway.

[bobsmith]

I used KKS at my last school, then convinced me new school to switch to it's successor (RS ConnectEd) as I found KKS so easy to run and very competitively priced.

 

It also has the fringe benefit of alerting me to which parent's have invalid numbers, missing numbers etc.

 

With the App available now you can make the cost to parents zero (Once you get them set up on it!)

 

If you want more integration with your MIS you can go down the route of schoolcomms which looks good.

 

If you have loads of money and want all your products from the same supplier you can always get intouch (for SIMs schools)

[sparkeh]

^That reminds me, Schoolcomms has an app with notifications, you just need to hassle parents to install!