On Call System

[Ghostdancing]

I am looking for an easy solution to alert our Pastoral Staff if their assistance is needed in a Classroom.

Ideally a simple desktop shortcut that would send an automated message including location (classroom) to a shared mailbox or message system.

 

How do other schools allow teachers to ask for assistance from the classroom with minimum impact on their time.

 

At the moment, staff have to compose an email which is picked up by the pastoral staff on an iPad.

[Jcx500]

Have you looked at Netsupport Notify?

[synaesthesia]

Our network manager knocked up a form tacked onto our wordpress internal site which is linked on staff desktops, they fill in who and where, someone comes, and whilst doing that they get downloaded a proper form to fill in details. Free, easy and reliable.

[FN-GM]

If you have SIMS there is a feature built in for this.

[DrBeaker]

Walkie-talkies and a member of staff on-duty.

[synaesthesia]

If you have SIMS there is a feature built in for this.

 

Where abouts is that please?

Interested, not seen it, wonder if it's quick enough too sometimes (well SIMS certainly isn't!)

 

Having a paper trail is very handy for some incidents hence the walkie-talkie thing didn't last long for us.

[psydii]

Officially we use Classcharts. Yet almost always the teacher just emails the room number to a shared mailbox designed for the purpose (it is quicker). The shared mailbox is monitored by admin staff who between them are always in front out their inbox. They use a 2-way radio to call the duty teacher to provide support. The duty teacher is backed-up by a duty member of SLT should the Duty teacher already be engaged. The receiving member of admin staff will then log the matter in classcharts as details come in.

 

Events logged in classcharts in the first instance also generate an email to the admin team - so either way email is the medium by which the radio operatives learn of an event.

 

Prior to classcharts events would just be emailed and logged in SIMS. I think long ago we used bromcom for the alerts.

[msi_school]

There is not a simple computer based answer to on call. When you want on an call member of staff you want them now and you want to know they have received your message and are on the way.

 

This is very similar to calling the emergency services, you ring 999 and speak to a dispatcher who calls the emergency services and dispatches them. we use a phone for this in both cases because everyone on the call knows the other parties have heard and understood the call.

 

Most successful systems in school copy this system albeit without a dispatcher just an on call team with radios although I have seen dispatchers in some large schools with discipline issues. I know it can be an issue to have the on call team carry their radios and answer them but at least the caller knows that they have not received the message and can try another member of staff or communication method.

 

Notification systems like netsupport notify or email work great for one to many communications where you can not call everyone individually and the rest of the school locking down or evacuating will alert the people whos have there PC off or are just not paying attention, but you can not guarantee the message will get through and you don't know about the failures.

[Linfit]

Where abouts is that please?

 

You can turn this on from Tools>Emergency Alert - just a tick box.

 

You also need to specify recipients - we have all our Senior Staff and non-teaching HOY's in the list. Turning the functionality on makes a small lifebuoy icon appear on the extreme right of the SIMS toolbar. If a member of staff clicks on this, an alert giving their name and location (taken from the timetable) goes to all the recipients specified in the list.

Recipients need to be running SIMS of course.

 

We use it here for staff to summon help if a pupil needs removing from a lesson and taken to isolation.

Edited May 9, 2019 by Linfit

[synaesthesia]

Cheers. Had a quick play; no good for staff without a timetable, cover staff, doesn't allow detail to be added for students involved etc so would still need more of a papertrail adding. Will stick to our contact form

[Linfit]

Yeah, like most of SIMS, it works (for a given value of "works"), but not necessarily in the way you would want it to.

[Ghostdancing]

Thanks for everyone's responses.

 

Currently staff send an email to an email address that is picked up on a couple of iPads. System works well, but with Outlook for Web would like to automate the process, i.e. a nice desktop shortcut that would populate the email for them.

 

desktop shortcut with "mailto:[email protected]?Subject=Location is" works well with Outlook on the PC itself.

 

At the moment we are moving away from SIMS, so the Emergency Alert is great, but need something more future proof.

[ITGURU]

Self built in-house on-call system where i am. When another school joined the trust they ditched the SIMS ON-call as it had no logging and wanted my system. My system lists all the students along with their photo, they do a request on call, enter details and submits to a member of staff. they radio year leads depending on the year to go sort. all stored in SQL database, bucket load of reports by year group, student, subject etc.

No other system did what they wanted so i built a custom one.

shortcut on staff desktops which takes them to the system, if it's an emergency (whole class issue) 2 button click but if for individual student short form asking for details and reason for on-call.

[DrBeaker]

Self built in-house on-call system where i am. When another school joined the trust they ditched the SIMS ON-call as it had no logging and wanted my system. My system lists all the students along with their photo, they do a request on call, enter details and submits to a member of staff. they radio year leads depending on the year to go sort. all stored in SQL database, bucket load of reports by year group, student, subject etc.

No other system did what they wanted so i built a custom one.

shortcut on staff desktops which takes them to the system, if it's an emergency (whole class issue) 2 button click but if for individual student short form asking for details and reason for on-call.

 

That's all and good. Not knocking that at all, I've setup some similar home-brew software stuff but nothing like that. However surely in the event you leave that school, who's to say the new IT person has the skills or even wants to update/maintain a home-brew software system like that?

[ITGURU]

That's all and good. Not knocking that at all, I've setup some similar home-brew software stuff but nothing like that. However surely in the event you leave that school, who's to say the new IT person has the skills or even wants to update/maintain a home-brew software system like that?

The system self runs..not had to make any tweaks to it in ages. that would then be their decision whether to continue with it or not or advertise for someone with the skills. every network is different and you could say that about everything. Just because we do everything in house to save costs doesn't mean there's not someone out there who can do what we do.