Using Tech Tools to Improve School-to-Home Communication

Effective communication between schools and families is critical for student success. With the rise of new technologies, schools now have more options than ever when it comes to keeping parents informed and engaged. Implementing a comprehensive school management system software solution can greatly enhance school-to-home communication efforts.

Benefits of Improved School-Home Communication

When schools and families work together as partners in education, students reap immense rewards. Some benefits of healthy school-home communication include:

• Better student achievement - Studies show that when parents are aware of what students are learning and how they can support academic goals at home, test scores improve.
• Improved student behavior and attendance - Consistent procedures for contacting parents regarding attendance or discipline issues encourages accountability.
• Higher parent involvement and satisfaction - Tools that provide parents visibility into school academics and operations foster better relationships.
• More efficient school administration - Automated communication frees up staff time previously spent fielding parent inquiries. Implementing the right tech tools makes maintaining these benefits at scale possible for schools and teachers.

Key Features of Parent Communication Software

Comprehensive school management system software solutions typically include built-in parent communication tools alongside other administrative capabilities like attendance tracking, gradebooks, calendars, and student information systems. Key features to look for include:

• Customizable school-to-home alerts and notifications - Emails, texts, and push notification alerts that can be tailored to different parent groups or needs.
• Teacher, team, or admin-initiated communications - All stakeholders can communicate updates and reminders related to their scope.
• Student performance updates - Automated grade, attendance, and assignment updates promote transparency.

• Secure parent portal access - Give parents visibility into relevant academic data for their students.

• Two-way private messaging - Provide direct channels for parents to ask questions and voice concerns.

• Teacher conference scheduling - Make signing up for parent-teacher meetings more convenient.

• Multilingual support - Reach diverse families by supporting non-English languages.

Choosing a system with robust, two-way communication capacity ensures parents have continual access to student data while also having clear paths for providing feedback to schools.

Improving Specific Communication Touchpoints

In addition to core system-wide communication tools, schools can utilize edtech to improve many specific touchpoints with parents and guardians.

Daily Attendance Updates

Automated attendance alerts allow parents to stay up-to-date on any tardies, unexcused absences, or early dismissals for their students via their preferred communication channel, whether email, text, phone call or app notification. This gives them opportunity to course correct attendance issues with their child in near real-time rather than finding out at the end of the term when problems have compounded. Most systems also allow attaching lesson plans, homework assignments, or other resources to these automated messages to keep learning on track during any absences.

Student Grade & Assignment Tracking

Modern student information systems give parents immediate visibility into grades, attendance records, and assignments as soon as teachers enter them into the centralized system. Push notifications and email summaries can also be configured to provide updates on their student's progress at custom intervals without parents having to log in and check manually. Granting this real-time transparency allows parents to identify any issues and work with students early to get them back on track.

School Events Calendars

Syncing school event calendars like sports games, school plays, parent nights, field trips etc. to parents' personal online calendars or devices prevents anything from falling through the cracks. Most school management software will facilitate this synchronization along with automated reminders about the event details as the date approaches. Maintaining an easily accessible school event calendar keeps parents informed and engaged.

Emergency Notifications

In any emergency situation like weather closures, safety threats, or health issues, centralized parent communication systems allow schools to instantly reach all families through multichannel notifications by email, voice call, text, and push notifications. Having this capacity for timely, bulk communication is essential for safety and coordination.

Teacher Onboarding for Parent Partnership

When onboarding new teachers, providing training resources to help them effectively build positive relationships with parents sets them up for success. Facilitating regular, consistent two-way communication should be the goal of any new teacher. Back-to-school nights, introductory phone calls, weekly or monthly email updates, and an open-door policy for addressing parent questions are all hallmarks of strong school-family partnerships at the classroom level. Having school-wide communications software helps streamline these best practices.

Measuring Impact of School Management Software

When researching school management system software, look for providers that track usage analytics related to family engagement so schools can measure the impact over time. Examples of key metrics include:

Parent portal logins and page views Automated alert open and clickthrough rates Attendance and grade update delivery and read rate Two-way message and email volume Parent conference sign up rates Event synchronization and attendance As schools roll out new technology initiatives, evaluating performance metrics allows them to identify adoption, refine deployment, maximize impact on school-home relationships, and ultimately boost student achievement.

Frequently Asked Questions About School-Home Communication Software

As school leaders explore technology options to enhance family engagement, they often have some common questions around implementation. We’ve compiled high level answers to some frequently asked questions related to communication features of school management system software.

Does the software integrate with our student information system?

Established providers will have experience integrating with all major student information systems through secure APIs. This facilitates passing critical information on grades, attendance, assignments etc. into the communications system for timely updates to parents. Be sure to ask potential providers about their integration experience.

How does the system help track, organize and manage parent involvement?

Quality engagement systems will provide schools visibility into parent participation rates across conferences, events, portal logins, and two-way communications. This allows schools to identify engagement gaps with either individual parents or demographic groups that may require alternate communication strategies.

What options for customization and personalization are available?

Top-tier management software allows schools to customize communication templates, set rules triggering automated alerts, tailor portal views and permissions based on parent groups, define custom fields for synchronization, and more. These tools empower schools to personalize both system-wide and classroom communications to meet community needs

What non-English language support is offered?

In multilingual communities, robust communication systems will provide native language support for emails, text messaging, push notifications, and voice calls alongside machine translation capabilities for portal content. Ask providers about the specific languages supported within their family engagement tools.

Can teachers communicate directly with parents using the system? Yes, quality systems facilitate both systemic and classroom-level communications. Individual teachers should be able to directly message parents of students in their classes, provide grade and assignment updates, schedule conferences or calls, and more based on role-based permissions. This nurtures consistent two-way communication.

How can you ensure adequate cybersecurity protections? As with any education technology, robust cybersecurity policies, access controls and data encryption are mandatory. Ask potential vendors to provide specifics regarding their security infrastructure, penetration testing, and compliance with standards like FERPA and COPPA related to student data privacy and safety.

What type of customer support comes with the system?

Especially during implementation phases, access to timely customer support is critical for schools and teachers. Providers should offer multiple support channels (phone, email, chat, etc) alongside comprehensive self-service training resources like documentation, webinars, and video tutorials.

Conclusion

Implementing parent engagement software promotes transparency, nurtures student achievement, and fosters stronger school-community relationships - but only with sustained, two-way communication facilitated through the right tools. Purpose-built school management system software provides a scalable foundation for consistent, personalized, and automated communication between schools, teachers, and diverse families. When evaluating options, be sure to scrutinize language support, customization flexibility, analytics capacity, data integration, and training resources to ensure optimal adoption. With smart strategies and the right technology, schools can overcome communication barriers, involve more parents, and unlock better outcomes.