Supporting Parents/Guardians with Cloud based Systems

[jimmckenna]

General question this one!! Are you finding that you are being asked to support parents/guardians accessing cloud based systems? I am talking about parental access to VLE's or MIS type systems. Login issues, General Help Requests etc etc. Not school devices, personal devices. I have resisted this so far as it would add a potential support population of 3000+ for me to support, in addition to everything else. Granted that many parents are Tech "savvy" these days, many are not !! Just asking for other experiences. Do you support parents? Where do you draw the line? Are management asking you to support? Have you had more staff (doubt it!!) Any feedback much appreciated!!

[jthompson]

We get a fair amount of password requests for EduLink, when in the vast majority of cases they can self-serve a password reset. No idea how many parents are doing that for themselves and not involving us, though, so no real idea of percentages.

 

To try to reduce it, I created a page on our website with signposting to the password reset link, and gave the page a friendly URL so that reception staff can just give that out over the phone when needed (i.e. no multi-step instructions or forwarding of enquiries needed). Hoping that that does the trick.

 

Once they're signed in, we get very few support requests about how to use it. EduLink is now the only account that parents need for school stuff.

 

Google Classroom guardian summaries, however, create a fair amount of confusion when we initially send out invitations. No matter how carefully you craft the comms around it, plenty of people still don't read it and assume that it's going to let them log into Google Classroom.

[TechMonkey]

We have a specific email address that feeds in to our helpdesk for parents so we can track the support level. Other than that we create helpsheets to try and minimise the amount of interaction needed.

[DrCheese]

We have a specific email address that feeds in to our helpdesk for parents so we can track the support level. Other than that we create helpsheets to try and minimise the amount of interaction needed.

 

Yes we do the same. Separate queue on our service desk for them & we create as many knowledgebase articles as we can to try and support them. I don't think you can not support them really, it's either you or you'll have to give access to someone else in the school to do so, which is a worse option.

[jimmckenna]

Hi, thanks for the replies!! We do have an email address and also have several help sheets for parents. What is happening now is the pressure is growing to telephone parents and offer verbal support. Particularly, with parents who are not tech-savvy. Having now made a couple of calls you can be on the phone for 20 mins + easily, going round in circles. Is there any schools offering telephone support. My view on this is that we are not a call centre. Interested if other support teams in schools are seeing this development. Cheers

[chris11256]

I wouldn't say we get a large amount of emails, usually get a dozen or so whenever they're told that reports are available. We don't offer phone support though, email only.

[TechMonkey]

Hi, thanks for the replies!! We do have an email address and also have several help sheets for parents. What is happening now is the pressure is growing to telephone parents and offer verbal support. Particularly, with parents who are not tech-savvy. Having now made a couple of calls you can be on the phone for 20 mins + easily, going round in circles. Is there any schools offering telephone support. My view on this is that we are not a call centre. Interested if other support teams in schools are seeing this development. Cheers

 

We did during lockdown and it does pop up every now and then. Luckily we have a remote support system that we can deploy externally so use that when possible. We limit what we cover and do and make sure that is very clear. But now we have mostly online systems we don't really have much issue.

[haci]

Hi, thanks for the replies!! We do have an email address and also have several help sheets for parents. What is happening now is the pressure is growing to telephone parents and offer verbal support. Particularly, with parents who are not tech-savvy. Having now made a couple of calls you can be on the phone for 20 mins + easily, going round in circles. Is there any schools offering telephone support. My view on this is that we are not a call centre. Interested if other support teams in schools are seeing this development. Cheers

 

Think your first port of call should be your contract/job description.

I've always resisted calling parents but do occasionally get asked to do so, mostly its password resets and i send those back to the staff member requesting support for them to pass on.

anything beyond that I would refuse as it is beyond the definition of my role.

[paulkerton]

It all depends on what is being asked. If a parent is having trouble logging into our Parents Evening System we will support that by email on a dedicated email address, using the parent's email address that's on the system to communicate with them (ie we don't respond if its from an email address we don't recognise) We sometimes have parents ask to reset student email accounts, but we generally defer to the child on that, as its their account not their parent's.

 

We don't do telephone support and we don't do support for personal devices. They do try though. We've had a few incidents where parents are "having laptops repaired" so ask to borrow them from us "in case of lockdown and they don't have a device if it happens" which is always fun.

[pete]

If systems that we provide aren't working as expected, we'll help / check our things are correct. Basic advice is given via email.

 

If the problem is with the parent's device / home network (our stuff's working but they're using IE6 on Win7 and a site doesn't work, for example), we mention where the problem lies but otherwise don't get involved.

 

Short version: Certain parents / families ruined it for everyone else.