Schoolcomms

Hi guys - just to say thanks for all the support we have had in these forums we have decided that: For the first 25 people to visit our stand (each day) we will give you our text messaging licence free for a year. No obligation, nothing to pay, just free. Just come to stand B295 and tell us you love EduGeek and Schoolcomms! Best wishes from everyone at Schoolcomms

Hi everyone, as we are back sponsoring the forum I thought I would just re-introduce us and let you know what we do. We help you engage better with parents. This includes: A parent portal showing behaviours, achievements, timetables, assessments, student info, make payments, clubs and more… Group emailing, including bulk sending school reports and timetables Collect payments for trips, dinner money etc. Two way SMS and free app messaging Attendance management And because we live in the modern world all of this is available to parents and students through website School Gateway, and smartphone apps: Apple, Android What makes us different? This is one system, completely integrated with SIMS, and it's so easy we can have you set up in your school in 20 minutes. Oh yes, and you can try it completely free with no obligation for 30 days. I hope that gives you a flavour for who we are, we don’t really provide support through EduGeek, but if you have any questions don’t hesitate reply to this thread or PM us and we will get back to you.

Thanks for the kind words of support everyone. @JNStiles - if you drop me a PM we can set you up with a completely free 30 day trial.

You can configure Schoolcomms to automatically SMS behaviour (and achievements and assessment manager grades), no extra steps required when recording them in SIMS. If the parent has our smart phone app installed on their phone this is automatically sent as a push notification (free) instead and they can see a history of behaviours and achievements for their children on the app (or website). This is more commonly used for more minor behaviour incidents though, for the major incidents SMS is usually not the best form of first contact...

We have been a SIMS technical partner for many years. We have found the partner team good to work with. I would talk to the partner team about what you want to do first, they have a great knowledge of other partner products and there may be something out there that does what you need - which will save you a lot of effort and maintenance risk. Efficiently integrating with SIMS is not trvial - but if you are sticking to doing what others have done before (e.g. writing back Behaviour) then the worst of the rough edges will have been removed and the partner team will be well positioned to help you.

You can but we do not recommend it, because however good your HTML the vast array of email clients that parents might be using on devices with different screen sizes means that you can never be sure how it will actually appear for parents. To be confident about how it will appear you are much better off attaching it as a PDF or MS office document. Some schools also put a plain text version of the words in the email body for quick consumption on a mobile handset (you should expect >30% of parents to consume your emails on a mobile device, for some areas it is more like >70%).

Yes I'm afraid we don't yet have any functionality to automatically send messages regarding detentions at the moment. You can automatically send a message (SMS or free app message) when you enter a behaviour incident (often recorded alongside a detention) in SIMS. The parent can then follow the link the message and look at the behaviour detail on School Gateway - here they can see the action taken for the behaviour incident (which can be a detention). But at the moment you can't see the details of the detention. We have it on the list of possible enhancements, but we aren't there yet.

We would like to do this, but it wont be for some time I'm afraid - next year at the earliest. I can completely appreciate why it would be useful, especially for those who use Excel as the go to ad-hoc data manipulation tool (I count myself in there). But we just don't get many requests for this and we have a really long list of stuff that we want to do at the moment and not enough people to do it all. We do of course import all your groups from SIMS (or you can create groups in Schoolcomms - but as other posters have said, probably better to keep them in SIMS). That way you can re-use the groups if you are doing more than one piece of comms. I'm sorry we can't do something sooner - but we have to make tough priority calls.

We've now been looking at how to best display this Assessment Manager data in School Gateway (the portal that parents log in to). This is the current proposal for School Gateway App: Assessment will be a new section on the main screen: This will lead to a list of marksheets (you can see the automatic green dots to flag where marksheets or aspects have changed): These will lead to a list view of the aspects (what they will see is the column name, rather than the aspect name, aspects will be ordered as per the marksheet in SIMS): Things will be similar in web, except there we think we have the screen real estate to do away with the marksheet selection screen: We'd love feedback on a couple of things: 1. Should we call it "Assessment" or is there a name that would better resonate with parents? 2. We would like to show (for example) current and target grades side by side, rather than just in a list - but there's no meta-data in SIMS to signify relationships between aspects (we think?), so we would either have to make an implicit link based on the names given to the aspect columns (a bit of a shaky approach), or provide a whole user interface for mapping aspects to how they should appear (seems like too much effort for the school vs. impact for parent). Any other ideas? is this important? Let us know what you think

We can't offer the number of configuration decisions that some other systems can, but if you are looking for a more out of the box solution for providing information to parents and students then we might be worth a look. From a standing start, we can have you set up in less than 20 minutes with parents able to log in to a website or smart phone app and seeing the SIMS data you want them to see. Give us another 10 minutes and we can have you collecting for trips and lunch money on there as well if you like.

Can you explain a little more what you want to e-mail about? We provide a system to send e-mails to groups of students in SIMS (year groups, class groups, etc. or any other groups in SIMS or Discover ). You can also create custom groups within Schoolcomms and send to those. PM me or visit our website if you want more information

The first challenge is deciding what, how and when to read from SIMS: Current mock-up of the school interface for configuring what you want to share: Current assumptions: Schools will generally create bespoke marksheet(s) to share, rather than using an existing one? – but this isn’t essential, you can select any of your marksheets. Primarily interested in the current grade from a marksheet/aspect, not the history? We are going to ignore the “data entry complete” tick box in SIMS (instead there is the tick box in Schoolcomms you can see above) We will display the marksheet column names, rather than the actual aspect names to parents/pupils

Hi everyone –our new Online Reporting product is going great. The combination of getting all that useful school info, free text messages and making payments all in a free smartphone app seems to be a real winner. We are now building (hopefully in time for next term, but not quite sure about that yet) support for Assessment Manager data. We left this out of the first release because it’s pretty complicated, also because you can already send out Assessment Manager reports in bulk from Schoolcomms Messaging so we weren’t sure how much it was really wanted. But we are getting asked for it now so we are going to do it! We’ve already talked to quite a few schools (many thanks) about how they would like it to work but we’d love to get your opinions on our designs as well. I'll post about the different parts of the design over the next couple of weeks/months.

This is now live You don't need to do anything, it should just be there next time you open Schoolcomms.

At the moment we only export AM/PM registration, exporting individual lesson attendance is quite a significant additional development. It's a potential future addition to Online Reporting (for both the use cases you suggest) so good to get the feedback - if we did lesson level attendance then we would probably split the import so that you could choose what to import when to keep the load on a school's SIMS server to a minimum. We are looking at various options for providing more security around distribution of reports. There is always a balance between security and ease of use, and we try to strike that balance by talking to our customers. So far, most seem happy with distributing via email - but we are looking at alternative options as well.

Thanks for pointing out the sorting problem - we'll get that fixed. It probably needs a new desktop release so it will get bundled into the next one of those. We'll take a look at saving the path as well. It might be to the machine rather than to the user? Thanks again for the feedback.

We’re very flattered by your interest in what we might get up to next and the nice things you have to say about us. We think it is less frustrating for Schools to only discuss future developments when we can commit to a delivery date. No vapourware. But we will keep investing in both our existing and new products. Most of the innovation comes customers - we listen to our customers (all of them, not just people on Edugeek!) and do that. We don't employ brainy people to gaze into crystal balls. Regarding our relationships with RBS and Capita: We have a commercial and technical relationship with RBS. If you buy Parents Evening System from us you can message parents directly from Parents Evening System using Schoolcomms (these will all show up in Schoolcomms sent items, can be logged back to SIMS Comms Log from there etc. as per any other Schoolcomms message). We are a SIMS Technical Partner, and do lots of integration (Contact details, Groups, Attendance, Behaviour, Achievements, Exam timetables, Curriculum timetables, Profile reports, Assessment Manager reports, SIMS Dinner Money (and probably some more I have forgotten) and Write Attendance, Comms Log, SIMS Dinner Money). We don’t actively sell SIMS – typically we spend our time talking to schools who already have SIMS. As far as I am aware Capita don’t actively sell Schoolcomms.

There's lots of stuff in the press today about paying with mobile phone - but we got there before the big banks You can now make payments using our School Gateway smartphone app! It's been live for about a week and we have seen a lot of transactions go through already and some great feedack. Looking at the early behaviour it seems very popular for dinner money top up - probably due to our automatic links to SIMS Dinner Money and the cashless caterers. If you have a Schoolcomms payments licence then it's included free - you don't need to do anything other than let your parents know it's now available. So parents can now see their messages, attendance, behaviour, timetables student details AND make payments all in one place on School Gateway smartphone app or School Gateway

As a short term view we thought that a lot of schools might choose to put their term dates in the "School Details" section - this is free form text for a school to enter so things like term dates, address, or other such information could be put in there. We are thinking of putting a calendar in there, potentially linked to pull directly from the SIMS calendar. We'd be interested to get your feedback about whether you would want to share everything on the SIMS calendar with parents? School Bulletin is another one we could potentially look at. Good suggestions - keep them coming!

It sounds like your school have not switched Online Reporting on in Schoolcomms - but rather than try and diagnose here, I suggest you give our support team a call on 0844 445 7147, or PM me with your contact details and I will get them to give you a call. Ooops! We'll get something put on there.

I am pleased to say that Schoolcomms Online Reporting is now live The apps are in the app stores and School Gateway is rebranded and has all the new content in (take a look www.schoolgateway.com) Thanks so much for all of you who have provided feedback, or given the product a go for real whilst we were testing. It is *really* appreciated. The response to the product has been incredible, we've been live for just a couple of days and we have quite a few schools already activated with parents using it. The schools say they are getting really enthusiatic feedback from parents as well which is great to hear. If you are interested then of course PM me or visit www.schoolcomms.com. You can try any or all of Schoolcomms for free for real, whether you are an existing customer or not. (sorry for the plug, but hey we pay for it ) P.S:We have delayed Payments in the app slightly (it's still available by web of course). It will be live directly after easter. IOS is done and Android is basically there, but we were worried about putting it live right before the Easter holidays in case parents had any problems or questions and couldn't contact their school. Thanks again for all your contributions.

If we added the reg group after the name of each student in the search list would that help? We might be able to do that quite quickly.

It's a nice idea - it would require some pretty complex matching criteria and UI to resolve mismatches. As per my other reply, we are thinking about more sophisticated functionality around selecting recipients but it will form part of a larger project so wont come immediately. Interested to know if this is something that other people would find useful? It's not a request we have had much...

Yes we are looking at providing richer functionality for selecting recipients and related areas, it's a pretty old bit of Schoolcomms and the sophistication of what schools are using Schoolcomms for has grown immeasurably. I can't make any promises about when we will do this but we are aware and want to cover this properly as part of some longer term plans.

Yes when you compose a message you can choose "App only", "SMS only" or "App or SMS" (default). So if you select "App only" then the message will only go to those that have downloaded the app.