Parents of the modern era are involved in impacting a child’s education more than ever before. They prefer schools with modern facilities and best infrastructure to ensure their child receives the best.
In the current scenario, school’s too, expect parents to be equally involved in impacting the education of their children. The contribution of a parent in a child’s life plays a big role in his/her achievement in the school.
Schools are on the path of enhancing the communication channel with parents through personal meetings, emails and text messages, all to keep them UpToDate.
The ones that are technologically advanced, are taking innovative measures to keep the parents in the loop. Mobile apps are one such discovery for school to enhance their communication with parents. Apps include various features such as blogs to keep the parents informed about significant activities, information on unscheduled holidays and much more.
Let’s look at different features of a mobile app that can enhance the parent-teacher relationship in your school:
#1- Easily accessible information
Every school has a website that acts as a digital bridge between parents and schools. Now imagine if you could offer every information on your website in your app, without spending a fortune.
Your mobile app can be a pivotal platform for providing important information to parents right on their smartphones. In the same light, teachers could simply download the app on their personal phones and get connected to parents instantly.
The pervasiveness of smartphones makes it easier for every parents to download your mobile and stay updated every minute. This eliminates the need to fire up the website on a laptop or desktop. The benefit of staying updated helps to avoid situation when they receive overwhelming information all at once.
AppMySite is a great WordPress Mobile App Builder for schools that can help convert your website into a robust app. Building a mobile app doesn’t necessarily have to be months long journey that involves heavy cost. For starters, you can build your app for free and test it on a real device.
#2- Scheduler for planned activities
Parents are extremely curious about the activities of their child in the school and look forward to being well-informed. Some schools use text messages to inform parents about important events and unplanned holidays. However, there is no other way to reach out instantly to the parent to update them about the activity of the child.
A mobile app can overcome this challenge by featuring an in-built calendar for the parents to review. Teachers can regularly update this calendar by feeding in activities each day. In place of shuffling the school dairy every day, this feature can help the parents to be well prepared for daily activities well in advance.
You can also choose to set push notifications to parents on important occasions such as annual day, sports day, scholar day and more. Additionally, you can allow parents to book appointments to meet through the calendar.
Push notifications are a better alternative to emails and text messages because they are difficult to miss, especially if they are from the child’s school. Furthermore, these notifications can act as reminders for approvals from parents for upcoming trips, seminar participation and more.
#3- Digital access to directory
Directory works in the same manner as a calendar does. This feature can extend extra comfort to the parents when they are looking for a phone number of a particular department of your school.
You can save the parents from struggling through the internet or the handbooks to look for a phone number of a particular departments. For instance, parents struggle to find out the last date to deposit the fee for a trip. This can be simplified if you include a directory in your app.
The directory feature can be integrated in your school app in a way that it facilitates calling within a click. Most schools have a digital directory on their website, but making it available on their smartphones can simplify the process further.
#4- Regular updates from the school
This is feature is mostly found on school websites. Every significant achievement or a milestone that the school achieves is updated on the website to keep the parents informed.
Most commonly, schools create blogs and posts them on the website. This feature can also be included on a mobile app for schools by simply converting website into app.
Instead of waiting for parents to see latest updates for weeks, you can simply notify parents the same minute you upload content. When you turn website into app with AppMySite, every time you upload a new blog on your website, it will be instantly reflected on your app too.
This will not only bring you closer to the parents but also ensure their complete involvement of the child’s education.
#5- Forum to connect parents
Giving parents a platform to discuss the difficulties they have been facing can in turn help improve your services as a school. A forum can also act as commonly asked questions about admission and fee payments which can easily be solved by reading answers from other parents.
In addition, teachers can spontaneously respond to individual problems from parents on the forum itself.
As a whole, if this platform is made available on the smartphones of the parents through a robust mobile app, it will be much more accessible and convenient.
#6- Review child’s performance
In this post, we discussed how the involvement of the parents helps in improving the performance of a child. To start with, it is important that the parents are well aware of the how the child is performing in every assessment at school.
Additionally, your app can facilitate in informing the parents about the child’s performance in the daily tasks, homework and behaviour in the classroom.
If you don’t want to get into the complexity of codes, the teachers can simply upload the grades after test, every day homework to keep the parents in loop.
#7- Increased approachability
There is a lot of dependency that both the parents and teachers can reduce if they can get in touch with each other on a direct platform.
A contact form on your mobile app can be a great medium for both the parties to reach out to each other. For instance: parents can simply fill up a contact form and ask queries rather than being dependent on the child.
Furthermore, the contact us form, if made available on the mobile app for school, can make it easier for the parents to reach out to schools.
Ending note
With more than 194 million app downloads in 2018, it is clear that people prefer apps because of the comfort they extend. By providing every information that is on your website in a mobile app, you will only be increasing parent’s involvement in a child’s education while improving your relationship with them.
AppMySite helps businesses turn website into app through a free app builder. You can now build your mobile app for school for free and test in on a real device. Once you’re happy with the performance of the app, you can upgrade to publish it on a relevant app store.
