School Mobile App

[Foresthippy]

Hi,

 

I've been asked to investigate the building of a school app to complement the website.

 

Does anyone have a school app that parents can install on their phone to get basic info, diary updates, news notifications etc.?

 

What mobile app building tool are you using?

 

Thanks,

John

[atcoates]

A few of my school have their sites hosted by WebAnywhere and they got them to develop apps for them.

 

https://www.webanywhere.co.uk/mobile may well give you a few pointers into what parents are after if nothing else.

Edited September 20, 2017 by atcoates

[howartp]

https://www.concept4.com who make Homework4 online student planner - a whole school homework solution by Concept4 plus various other apps and websites for education and healthcare.

[Sylv3r]

Personally I prefer a website which is mobile aware rather than a specific app - it's one less thing to worry about and maintain.

[howartp]

(Concept4's websites are mobile aware.

[Edu-IT]

Personally I prefer a website which is mobile aware rather than a specific app - it's one less thing to worry about and maintain.

I would agree with this too. No need to worry about having apps for different operating systems either or whether they'll break with updates.

[Norphy]

A possible lazy way of developing an app might be to put the bulk of your effort into the mobile website and have your app just be a wrapper for your mobile site. If all the app needs to do is provide information, this could work. I’ve seen companies take this approach before; you don’t have a huge development overhead plus you get your presence in the various app stores.

 

Like I say, lazy but one way of doing it.

[AJWhite1970]

When we redid our site a couple of years ago we did it entirely in html5 and made it fully mobile aware. Took away the need to run and maintain two separate systems

[TwistedHelixis]

Personally I prefer a website which is mobile aware rather than a specific app - it's one less thing to worry about and maintain.

 

Yep - the new Google Sites 2 is very good for this and gives design layouts for all form types and its FREE (ish)

[sted]

Personally I prefer a website which is mobile aware rather than a specific app - it's one less thing to worry about and maintain.

 

i agree 100% but people seem to see/want apps these days even if there are no advantages over just using a browser look at facebook all the app does as far as i can see that the web page dosent on a phone is drain the battery but people expect to use the app

[atcoates]

No one wants to go looking for information. They want the information to come to them, newsletters, important dates etc. As a parent would rather have to go trawling through a website for newsletters and important dates or have that pushed to you through and app? The apps we use parents select the year group of their child and they only receive the information relevant to them.

[mavhc]

https://onesignal.com/ lets you subscribe to a website, with a plugin for wordpress you can create a new notification for each blog post for example.

 

Next make sure your events/calendar has an ics feed, and have buttons for subscribe with google, and a webcal:// link for ios etc

 

eg Subscribe Link « Event Organiser Docs

 

You can subscribe to a category, so only Y1 events/posts for example

Edited September 21, 2017 by mavhc