What are some good applications for a school to use to manage parent/teacher communication?
June 14, 2011 11:44 AM Subscribe
Looking for an application for a small school that can manage a few specific tasks. Does this software exist?
I'm looking for an application that will allow teachers to have their own personal classroom web pages (all connected to a main school web site), update the information themselves through a browser interface, be user-friendly, and user friendly for the parents as well, and enable the teachers to post announcements that will send text messages to parents (e.g., a teacher can post a homework assignment for the day and a text message would be sent to stored numbers with the day's homework assignment). We currently use a program called Edline, but I don't see that it has the capabilities I'm looking for.
I'm looking for an application that will allow teachers to have their own personal classroom web pages (all connected to a main school web site), update the information themselves through a browser interface, be user-friendly, and user friendly for the parents as well, and enable the teachers to post announcements that will send text messages to parents (e.g., a teacher can post a homework assignment for the day and a text message would be sent to stored numbers with the day's homework assignment). We currently use a program called Edline, but I don't see that it has the capabilities I'm looking for.
Good ones? not sure. My kids' teachers use: weebly.com, myteacherpages.com, teacherweb.com, schoolworld.com, and edmodo.com.
All in the same school, and they all suck as best I can tell. Whatever you do, try to have everyone do the same thing in a coherent fashion, if only for the mutual technical support they can give one another.
Personally, I'm a big fan of Google Apps, but you will still have implementation issues, i.e. no matter what the tool, getting the implementation right is your biggest challenge, and getting teachers to keep things up to date is important. I'm not 100% sure how you'd set up the notifications, unless it's through a shared calendar.
posted by idb at 12:57 PM on June 14, 2011
All in the same school, and they all suck as best I can tell. Whatever you do, try to have everyone do the same thing in a coherent fashion, if only for the mutual technical support they can give one another.
Personally, I'm a big fan of Google Apps, but you will still have implementation issues, i.e. no matter what the tool, getting the implementation right is your biggest challenge, and getting teachers to keep things up to date is important. I'm not 100% sure how you'd set up the notifications, unless it's through a shared calendar.
posted by idb at 12:57 PM on June 14, 2011
My kids' school uses a company called Veracross. I think it has many more options than we're currently using, but what we are using in the parents' portal is pretty nice.
posted by ES Mom at 2:00 PM on June 14, 2011
posted by ES Mom at 2:00 PM on June 14, 2011
Response by poster: Thanks everyone. Veracross looks interesting. I'll start there. I don't think Basecamp or Coursesites are quite what I'm looking for.
posted by archimago at 4:02 AM on June 15, 2011
posted by archimago at 4:02 AM on June 15, 2011
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posted by nogero at 11:50 AM on June 14, 2011 [1 favorite]