Communication, Communication, Communication

I really don't know what happened there ... no posts in a fortnight?  Outrageous!

So, where were we?  My previous post was a bit of a moan at not achieving much (or at least it was the perception of not achieving much).

This week's focus: Communication

Parent communication, to be precise.  Specifically, our Parent Portal.

Our teaching staff have been using Portal for a number of years now and, since about September last year, we have been planning and preparing for Parent Portal launch.  Which was over a month late, incidentally.

It was officially launched on 27 February 2012 and what was the initial response from many of our parent body?  Marvelous!

In the first week, we have had maybe 70-80 emails from parents (mums and dads) who have all praised the service.  Here are a small handful of quotes:

• I think that the parent portal is very efficient and excellent tool to access my daughter's date and any information from the school on time.
• Just wanted to thank you and St-Chris for an excellent parent website. As a busy Dad this is truly revolutionary
• Congratulations! It is just great, easy to browse and very convenient

OK, OK.  It's not my work.  Our MIS provider did all the work.  But the point is, it isn't necessarily easy trying to improve school communication when you have 2384 'primary contacts' in a school (that's how many Parent Portal accounts we have created).

It provides access to selected areas of your children's data (e.g. attendance, timetable, assessments).  But for us, the breakthroughs are the Notices and Events widgets - inbox and calendar, if you prefer.

We can now deliver messages much more intelligently to each and every one of our families.  Don't have a child in Year 4?  OK, we won't send you any letters/notices/events about that year group.  Our parents now only get the messages they need.

Letters Home, Weekly Newsletters, Notices and Reminders are now all available in the Parent Portal.  In the short-term, we are also parallel-posting these onto our website.  However, this will come to an end at the end of Term 2.  From Term 3, the Parent Portal will be the only place they will be available.

We already have a 1-in-3 login rate and I expect this to rise to 50% within a week.  The incentive to login will increase as we phase out our web-site uploads.

So far, our parents love it!

If you're interested in reading more about our Parent Portal, you can visit our Parent Portal FAQs.

Less than the sum of its parts!

I can't say I've had the best or most fulfilling times since my last post.  As the blog title suggests, if you take what I think I've achieved and compare it to the effort, it doesn't seem to add up.

The group I'm leading to establish a coherent strategy for the school's ICT curriculum development met last week to 'finalise' the report: we don't leave until it's nailed was the brief.  Well, we didn't stay until it was done and it's still not finalised.  There's half a report on paper and that won't remain in its current form, either.

I'm doing lots of little jobs at the moment.  But they're jobs that seem to be taking up my time.  It's another period of 'I've been busy but I can't quite seem to prove it':

• I can't seem to nail my VLC investigation for the video-based demonstrations for students on our other site.  the DT Departments want to hook up (virtually) so the younger students can see their designs being CNC'd on the other site
• I've flirted with looking at online booking systems to assist with our school productions
• I can't nail the BSME's wish for a decent, affordable online recruitment system
• I tried to provide support for one of our MIS users, but found out there is a known issue with this particular feature ... and I can't help until the next upgrade (which is next week, mind you)
• I'm getting anxious about various hardware deliveries
• I haven't finished getting our standalone laptop setup for our MIS environment
• I really didn't do much walking about this week.  Some of my best work is when I walk about

On the plus side:
The Year 3 Terminals trial is up and away.  They've also got the LANSchool channel set (we're still learning how to exploit that fully).  Looking forward to seeing that trial in action.

We've arranged for some work to be done for us in preparation for our Parent Portal launch.  This should help with our preparations.  Looking forward to that ... I just hope everyone else is!

I finally got our MIS to do a big Mail Merge email (2 runs of 1200+ emails).  Having raised various tickets over the last few months, we got some advice from another client school in the region and that worked (thanks, DESS).  Very happy on that front.  Basically, we have to set off our big runs from the server itself as the size of the Mail Merge seems to crash an ordinary client (at about 600 emails).

I'm making inroads on our 'video 'trial'.  My tech team have been working hard on the background activity.  I have been in touch with ClickView a few times who have also set us up with online access.  Our DT department is up for being part of the trial.  I will also contact a further department.  This is looking good.  I just hope the trial goes well as it's the staff and students who will say if it's good!

Let's hope the parts add up to more next week.

A Week of Investigation

It's been a funny week: good, busy but odd at times.  But I can't nail why it's felt that way.  I think it's because it's been almost exclusively a week of investigations.  And if you have similar work to me you'll understand that investigations can lead to a lot of input, with little - or no - permanent output.

OK, here's a snapshot of the more useful elements of my week, in no particular order of importance or effort:

1. Dipped into my mailbox to address a few operational issues
2. Investigated how VLC might provide a network-based video streaming solution (using existing client technology) to a piece of cross-phase work being proposed by our DT departments.  Half a day's work
3. Investigated the latest upgrade of our MIS (we use Engage by DoubleFirst).  A full day (and a bit of the next)
4. Dipped into my mailbox to address a few operational issues
5. Upset a few members of staff over a trial I'm putting in place (a trial that excluded them - apologies, but it is a trial and, necessarily can't include everyone).  All week maybe?
6. Investigated how Google Apps might provide a short-term solution to a BSME Recruitment development.  Maybe a few hours
7. Began inspecting, in more detail, the ICT Bids by the various school's budget holders.  Half a day
8. Stole mini bars of chocolate from the HR Office, once or twice (a day)
9. Dipped into my mailbox to address a few operational issues

Let me pick on one of these: Item 3

Our Latest MIS Upgrade
We're into our third year of Engage.  They try to release an upgrade about once a month.  Now that's good and that's bad.  Good, in that clients know they're actively improving the product and listening to client feedback (well, at least I hope they are).  Bad, in that it is sometimes difficult to absorb (and hence, plan to roll-out) some of the juicier upgrades.

This one looks good, though, and one I hope to not only absorb, but recommend we exploit.  You see, for the last few months, we've been preparing to release our Parent Portal, which is part of the MIS.  This will give families access to various elements of information about their children (e.g. timetable, assessments).  There are also nice Notices and Events widgets to help us fine-tune communications.

But this release includes Lesson Planning and Lesson Templates.  Aimed at teachers (er, to plan lessons), it allows staff to 'publish to Contacts' and 'publish to Pupils'.  Although, in this release, the act of selecting this doesn't actually publish to Parent Portal, it will in next month's release (a good reason for monthly releases).

[The Pupil Portal is another development and will form part of a near-future release ... and blog, no doubt]

But when the lesson does get published, it will also provide details of assignments (aka homework).
So, no more:
"Hey, Ben.  Your homework diary is empty.  No homework today?"
"No, Mum.  We finished everything in class"
"Really?  That's interesting, because I've logged into my Parent Portal account and that suggests something quite different"
"Erm ..." stutter, stammer

Possibly, by the time our Parent Portal gets released (it's been a long process trying to get up-to-date email addresses), the next upgrade might already have been made available.  I still need to understand Lesson Planning more but my feeling so far is that it will be a good step forward, not only for home|school communications, but for remote access to lesson details, resources, deadlines, etc.

And you never know when the next school closure is!
____________

Oh, and my mailbox still has an operating level of about 280 unread emails in my inbox (and are likely to remain unread unless anyone knows how I can freeze time for a month or so).  And that doesn't account for those that get filtered out into other folders.