Norphy Posted December 21, 2023 Posted December 21, 2023 Hi folks, Further to my thread here, my son's school partnership (and Dumfries and Galloway in general) is no longer allowed to use ClassDojo for what seems like GDPR related reasons. The school partnership is looking for an alternative, but it isn't having much luck. They want something that has most of the functionality of Class Dojo; they were using it to communicate with parents, to allow parents to communicate back with them, to showcase what the students are doing in school and to award them points for good work and suchlike. The council removing access to it was a real blow, no mistake there. They've looked at mySchoolApp, See-Saw and Showbie but they've been discounted either because they're too expensive, or because they don't allow two-way communication. Right now, they're using FaceBook and Messenger to perform these tasks but this is far from ideal. I'm wondering what people here are using for this?
mavhc Posted December 21, 2023 Posted December 21, 2023 they were using it to communicate with parents, to allow parents to communicate back with them -- email to showcase what the students are doing in school -- email to award them points for good work and suchlike -- MIS? Spreadsheet?
Norphy Posted December 21, 2023 Author Posted December 21, 2023 Not an especially helpful response, if I'm honest. ClassDojo is more like a mini social network; as well as sending personal messages you can also send messages to groups and do things like likes and interact with content by doing likes etc. Can't do that in an email. Showcasing work with an email isn't especially practical either, ClassDojo automatically shrinks pictures and puts it into a format which is easily accessible and shareable. An email client won't without a lot of faffing and non-techs aren't going to do that. Putting points into an MIS or a spreadsheet stops the parents from being able to see it, plus Dojo also allows you to award "home points". Can't do that with a spreadsheet. These are two very small schools, with 4 teachers, six support and less than 60 students between them so they don't have any on-site tech support and they certainly don't have anything like a comms team.
Brimstone Posted December 21, 2023 Posted December 21, 2023 (edited) Not an especially helpful response, if I'm honest. ClassDojo is more like a mini social network; as well as sending personal messages you can also send messages to groups and do things like likes and interact with content by doing likes etc. Can't do that in an email. Showcasing work with an email isn't especially practical either, ClassDojo automatically shrinks pictures and puts it into a format which is easily accessible and shareable. An email client won't without a lot of faffing and non-techs aren't going to do that. Putting points into an MIS or a spreadsheet stops the parents from being able to see it, plus Dojo also allows you to award "home points". Can't do that with a spreadsheet. These are two very small schools, with 4 teachers, six support and less than 60 students between them so they don't have any on-site tech support and they certainly don't have anything like a comms team. Seesaw is free if you want to use it mainly for communication with student families and it can be single or 2 way...? I'm a bit surprised you are not signed for Showbie as Glasgow, Falkirk and the Scottish Borders all use this.... Edited December 21, 2023 by Brimstone
Norphy Posted December 21, 2023 Author Posted December 21, 2023 They were apparently quoted £2000 to use it. Just to clarify, I don't work for this partnership, they've just asked for help to look for alternatives.
Brimstone Posted December 21, 2023 Posted December 21, 2023 Whilst is has it's limitations to use the basics of messaging in Seesaw this can be done with the free version, see link below... https://help.seesaw.me/hc/en-us/articles/8773028118925-Family-messaging-settings-for-Seesaw-Basic-customers
mavhc Posted December 22, 2023 Posted December 22, 2023 Does your MIS not have a parent app? Why can't you put home points in a spreadsheet? Pretty sure email has a BCC feature
dhicks Posted December 22, 2023 Posted December 22, 2023 Pretty sure email has a BCC feature We've found deliverability to classes-worth (or yeargroups-worth) of parent emails from a standard email client (Gmail, in our case) to be poor - emails like that tend to get marked as spam too easily. There's also the issue of managing groups - having each teacher manage a set of email addresses doesn't work well, that sort of thing should be handled centrally by the MIS. Our MIS (iSAMS) handles emailing groups of parents (classs, yeargroups, etc) okay, if the MIS involved here doesn't do that then we've found Mailchimp to be a good option for sending group emails (we use it for our newsletter). At lower volumes you might be able to manage with their free tier. I have a script syncing data from our MIS to Mailchimp, it's the sort of thing you can get set up once and pretty much leave to run. £2,000 per year for a good platform, with support, to handle the features described here doesn't sound unreasonable.
Norphy Posted December 22, 2023 Author Posted December 22, 2023 £2,000 per year for a good platform, with support, to handle the features described here doesn't sound unreasonable. For a normal sized school, sure. For a pair of small village schools with barely sixty students between them it's completely unaffordable sadly.
mavhc Posted December 22, 2023 Posted December 22, 2023 Does seem like an essential MIS feature these days
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