Hard times in education
Most people who are involved in education are aware of the difficulty of funding in education. Government cuts, possibly forcing schools to consider acadamisation are happening every day.
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Our Blog
What is the value of parent engagement?
What is the value of "parental engagement" ? It is much heralded amongst Senior Leadership, Governors and Departments for Education. Why and how do schools increase parental engagement?
Government Cuts
AppsforSchools have very close ties with several senior leadership managers as well as teachers. We are acutely aware of the massive government cuts being required of schools.
When you shouldn't get an app for your school?
App technology has been around for school use for around 4 and a half years. Although the functions have improved massively, most schools are under-using the technology. Could this be the year when your school grasps the technology and makes it do what you want and not allow the app developer to tell you what you should do with an app?
App promo video made using smartphone only
What better way, we thought, to promote our apps than to film and edit our promo film entirely using an iPhone. Let us know what you think.
Read receipts with push notifications
For the past couple of weeks we have been busy testing read receipts as part of the push notifcation package and I am pleased to say it is finally ready to launch.
How to build a school app
Step 1.
Decide what you are trying to achieve with an app, it sounds obvious but is probably the most important decision you will make. Here are a few ideas:
- Provide a mobile version of your school website, simply promote school news, events and newsletters in a format that is more suited to mobile devices
- Use the app to push messages to parents, if you need more than just a blanket push, you will need a way of identifying individual parents, but this could save£000,s for the school
- Provide details of timetables, homework, detentions, attendance etc. This will require a snyc with your MIS but takes your app in a much more interesting direction
- Log progress, your app could allow students to log progress daily as part of their e-portfolio
- Something else, you could have a really wonderful idea about what a school app could do for your school, for example we produce GPS Sixth form registration apps, now is the time to scope it out, not half way through the launch.
Step 2.
Survey parents and pupils to find out what devices they are using
The crucial information here is penetration of smartphone usage and how many students/parents are using Windows devices, because if it is a significant proportion you need to consider launching a Windows version
Step 3.
Select a partner company
There are a growing number of companies offering apps and each one offers something slightly different. We are slightly biased but if you are having trouble identifying a provider contact us for an informal chat.
Step 4.
Build it
This part should be easy for you as your provider will be doing all the work, however make sure you get a preview version that you can provide feedback on if any changes are needed and show it to as many people as you can before launch as everyone has a different opinion.
Step 5.
Promote it
- How do you promote to parents to download the app and register
- Email download link out to all parents and students.
- Is the QR code printed on a newsletter or published on school website, or placed around school?
- Launch at Parents Evening? Involve PTA? Guide parents at face to face meetings?
Step 6.
Use it
These apps are only a tool and as with any tool they need to used to be useful.
E-planner App
It has been a very busy time for us at Apps for Schools, we have been rolling out some new functions which we will be blogging about over the next couple of weeks (unless of course things get busy, so if I don't do it please give me a nudge)
Mobile Website vs an App?
Earlier this week a school claimed that there is no need for an app given that websites are ever more responsive and able to provision for mobile devices.
MIS data - Supplier Vs student numbers
We have been having a play with plotly (Other data visulisation tools are availble but I just really like their URL https://plot.ly/) here at Apps for Schools, so we thought we would try out some data visulisation on the the various MIS providers.
So here is a quick overview of MIS provider plotted against the number of students, it does give an interesting spread and helps to quickly identify if a provider sits in the primary or secondary school camp (or both)
Here is a link to the embeded graph and thanks to Rich Harley for the original FOI request. Would be interested to hear your thoughts or if you have any prefered data visulisation tools.