Schoolcomms

Hi all. We have a new product specifically designed to help manage clubs. You can manage who is in the club by creating groups in SIMS or Schoolcomms. Then create club sessions, book students onto sessions and print a register. You can also assign a cost to sessions and this will then create an outstanding balance for each student. Parents can go onto our School Gateway smart phone app or website and see what sessions their child is on and pay off their balance. *Very* soon parents will be able to book sessions on there as well. If there is a charge for the sessions they book then it will then automatically charge their account. The product is developing fast and it's a new area for us so we'd love to hear what else you would like to do in the clubs space. Hope this helps, if you need any more info you are best to give us a call, or you can PM me.

They are still texted out... at the moment. We get it's a problem, we did it to provide a simple way to provide two factor authentication. So it would be a school level policy option to allow emailing.

Schoolcomms also replaces text messages with app messages, anyone who has the School Gateway app gets an app message (free), anyone who doesn't gets SMS, so you can be sure that everyone still gets the message. We figure it all out in the background so you just decide who you want to talk to and what to say and we find the cheapest way to send the message to them.

I'm glad you like the look of Schoolcomms And I am pleased to tell you students can also sign in to check their timetable either on School Gateway or apple/android app of the same name (and even prototype for apple watch ). Although some students would prefer not to know apparently: student twitter conversation - please excuse the language

You can do this in Schoolcomms There are mail merge fields which can be used in email, SMS or app messages for: Number of authorised absence sessions Number of un-authorised absence sessions Number of absence sessions (authorised and unauthorised) Attendance % These are the attendance stats as per what you would see in SIMS for the academic year to date. The attendance stats can also be shared in our School Gateway smartphone app and website so parents can see them whenever they want. You need both our Messaging and Online Reporting products to use these. We built them for the EEF Texting Parents project. The project is now finished, but the results are not yet published, qualitative feedback we got from schools on the project was that the intervention you are talking about doing here is an effective approach for reducing absence. The project team are heavily involved with the government behavioural insights team (the nudge unit). They did a lot of work on the wording on the messages, if you are interested PM me and I can link you up with the project team and they can give you some advice/experience.

Schoolcomms looks at the email address/mobile number in SIMS Personnel to send teacher stuff, and the email address/mobile number for parent attached to the student record for parent stuff.

I am pretty sure we have solved this in the display of timetables in our app. But we use the APIs to access SIMS rather than command reporter. You are welcome to have a go with our app if you like, give the team a call and they will set you up with a free trial (in fact I see you are in Cornwall (we are too) so I am sure they would happily come out to see you)

Yes the facility to write back to the SIMS Communication Log is there so you can easily keep a record of important messages against the pupil's record in SIMS. It also means that if you don't give access to Schoolcomms to all members of staff (e.g. teachers) then they can still see a record of messages sent/received.

The reality of modern email is that much more of it *can* be encrypted end to end than you think although not all providers choose to make use of this. We use a mail sending platform which attempts to negotiate a TLS encrypted connection with the recipient's mail service (e.g. Hotmail) if this is successful then the mail (and attachments like student reports which can also be emailed from Schoolcomms in bulk) are sent encrypted to the mail service, and if the recipient views their mail through a web client then you have end to end encrpyted mail. This is with no need for additional passwords (e.g. CipherPost). Hotmail, Google, AOL and others all provide those TLS connections. So can you guarantee that *all* email you send is encrpyted end to end? No If the recipient *wants* their email to be encrypted end to end (and is willing to choose a mail provider and access method on that basis) will it be? Yes Like Phil, I would make the comparison to the alternative - sending in the post (or worse still pupil post). You could send it secure signed for delivery, if the recipient choose to open it in front of the postman, stick it on their noticeboard in view of a window, or throw it in the bin without shredding it, then it's all for nothing. Email through a provider like Schoolcomms who makes these encrypted connections direct to email services I would say is significantly more secure than other practical alternatives.

Our app message handling logic has got pretty sophisticated, and the underlying push notification service provided by Apple "evolves". But just like SMS or email it is still possible to send a message that doesn't arrive under certain circumstances, so you still need to check delivery status.

We do everything on the basis of them being signed in on the app. If they download the app but don't sign in then messages go by text, if they sign in they go by app, if they sign out then messages will start going by SMS again. For every message you send there is per recipient delivery status in the sent items, you can see here whether the message went by SMS or app to each recipient, and you can see the delivery status: red - not sent, amber - in progress, green - for SMS this is delivered to the handset, for App this is actually read (app opened, message screen viewed).

Here's Jack in our dev. team playing with his evening project: Putting some School Gateway smartphone app content and putting it onto his Apple Watch: If you want a go (so you can convince your SLT they really ought to be buying you an Apple Watch) we can probably get this to you, just PM me. Let me know what you think! Any good ideas on uses of Apple Watch in education?

You are right, no school gets 100% app takeup, an app only solution is not feasible. Schoolcomms knows who has the app and who doesn't. When you want to send a message you don't need to think about that, you just compose the message and choose who you want to send it to. Schoolcomms looks at every recipient individually and if they have the app it goes as an app message (free) and if they don't it goes as SMS (and if they don't have a phone number it gives you paper lists for those that need contacting another way). So the more parents who download the app, the cheaper it gets, but you don't have to worry about who is getting the message through app vs SMS, we deal with that behind the scenes.

Yes we are thinking about better options for student login, texting the PIN provides good additional security, but we are considering a (school controlled) option to email PIN instead. We do definately get the point about students accessing timetables. We have a pretty good track record on this - you can email them from Schoolcomms, we have them on School Gateway web, we have them in SchoolGateway app, and now..... iWatch timetable !!! Not ready for the real world, just one of our superstar devs having fun. But cool to see what can be done, you saw it here first!

We have a product similar to TASC Insight. Parents register themselves, a text is sent to the parent with their PIN and they use that to login. If they lose their login details they can reset them themselves- so you don’t need to be involved at any point. You do need to have contact details for parents in SIMS, but we have useful stuff to make that pretty painless. Parents can see it all on our smartphone app as well as website, we find over 50% of access is on a mobile device, and the automatic push notifications mean parents know when there is new stuff to look at.

Obviously I'm going to say nice things about Schoolcomms, so I won't push it. All I would say is you can try it for yourself. You can have free trial of the entire product suite with zero commitment and we can typically get you up and running on the whole thing in less than 30minutes. Lots of schools use the trial with some "tame" parents and get their feedback. If you give the sales team a ring they will be able to find some schools like yours to talk to about their experiences. No comment on the nipples...

The other place you might want to take a look is here: Cloud Services and the data protection act - advice and supplier certification (from the DfE)

Thanks for everyone's feedback. So it looks like YouTube will be a goer - though there will be some limitation on access by some schools. And I think we'll have a feedback/'rate this page' on the video link page on the website so that we can get a feel for the number of schools who can't access it. We'll continue with written help-guides too. And of course there's our phone Support/Training team - but we're trying to help them maintain their call answer target of 90 seconds by offering good online alternatives :-) Many thanks Kirsty

We’re looking at creating video help guides for use by school administrators who use Schoolcomms. Is there likely to be an issue with staff being able to view videos, due to the levels of school internet security? We currently use YouTube and Vimeo. Would staff in your school be able to view these? Any other ideas...?

It's exam season again - so I just thought I would put out a reminder to Schoolcomms users that you can bulk email exam timetables. I say it's a reminder for users - we offer a free 30 day trial, so anyone can download Schoolcomms and send out all their timetables with no cost or obligation. It's pretty easy, just create an email in the normal way, select the year group you want to send for, click "attach" and choose exam timetables. Then you should see a list of exam timetables available in SIMS, select the one you want. Hit send. Simple as that. We read all the timetable data from SIMS and send the personalised email to each recipient with the correct exam timetable attached automatically. Great way to get some brownie points from your exams officer

It is actually quicker and easier for a parent to make a transaction using Instant Bank Transfer than it is with Debit/Credit card. As many parents are topping up dinner money quite often we think parents will find the slicker checkout process preferable. We don't know what the uptake will be until we launch it at the end of this month, but we've done our research with parents and typically we are seeing similar feedback as with the free app messaging - parents do want to help their schools save money. Also we give our schools "parent packs" which many schools use to help encourage parents to use the service and these will include lots of good stuff about why Instant Bank Transfer is safe, easy and cheaper.

Yes you can set limited number of places for trips, ask for consent, generate reports on all this etc. If you'd like a demonstration or want a free trial just PM me.

Hi all, We haven’t posted anything for a while and we are just releasing a pretty innovative new feature in our online payments system and we thought you might be interested: It will save schools A LOT of money. Parent payments in schools is now mainstream. You are probably in the minority now if you are a secondary school and don’t let parents pay for trips, dinner money etc. online, and if you are a primary school you will be in the minority by next year we think. So we wondered if we could do the same for Payments as we did with push notifications for texting – reduce the usage costs. If anything there is a bigger problem in online payments – whereas an SMS might cost 4-8p, transaction charges on payment systems are typically around 30-35p for debit card and 45-60p for credit card. Our existing debit and credit card payment methods are great – lots of people have got a card, many people are familiar with paying online, and we can provide great reports to mean your business manager doesn’t just get a lump of money turn up in their account, not knowing where it came from and what it’s for. Everything can be reconciled back. So we wanted to offer all of that convenience, but… cheaper Turns out we can make it cheaper, much cheaper. In fact we can do it at less than half the cost – just 16p. Instant Bank Transfer will go live for our payments customers next month. When parents pay, they will be presented with the option to pay by Instant Bank Transfer or card. If they opt for Instant Bank Transfer, they will be asked to enter their bank account details and confirm the payment. When they make subsequent purchases they won’t even need to re-enter details just confirm the amount. Even simpler than paying by card. And for the Business Manager – nothing much changes. The reports still show who paid for what and when regardless of what method they chose to pay with. It’s just cheaper than it used to be. We reckon this will save the average secondary school £1000 - £2000 a year vs. using card payments only.

Thanks for the feedback Vikpaw, really appreciated. Yes I am afraid we have chosen to focus all our energy on providing a great product for SIMS schools, so now you have moved off SIMS we unfortunately have to go our separate ways. One small correction: Our payments product is our own, not a third party product. It's completely integrated with everything else we do, so for example on the parent app (Android as well, not just IOS btw) you can pay for dinners, trips etc. as well as get the free app messages, see timetables, clubs, attendance, behaviour etc. In fact payments has been a big growth area for us, a large proportion of our customers use it. We are about to launch a new feature which will halve transaction fees for schools... which is cool... I'll save that for another post though.

Hi Pipz If you contact us I expect we can find you a school nearby that you can talk to about it. And of course you can just try it for free for a month to check it works for you and that your parents like it - it takes literally a couple of minutes to switch it on, and we'll walk through it all with you and help you set up your first trips. If you already have parents using the app for the free app messages then they will be able to pay through the app as well. And it gives an added incentive for parents to download the app so you will probably reduce your SMS bill without even trying.