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Project Overview
The Groupcall Xpressions app is a multi-platform communication hub for parents to receive messages and updates in real time about their child’s progress and achievements at school. Parents can be notified instantly about their child’s attendance, achievements, attainment, low balances on payment accounts, late library books, homework assigned and much more depending on the systems used within school. Crucially, this is all done with just one application, bringing all communications to one place for the convenience of parents, and enabling a truly holistic, live view of their child’s education and wellbeing.
Organisation
Team
Groupcall Xpressions has been project managed by Graham Reed and developed by our in-house developers.
Project Brief
As a parent, there are many things I need to know about when it comes to my child’s education. Are they turning up and on time? Are they behaving? What are they achieving? Are they doing well in Maths? What lessons do they have today? It’s snowing today, will school be closed? When it is the next school inset day?
The Groupcall Xpressions app can provide all of this and so much more instantly to the palm of a parent’s hand; to a mobile device, tablet or PC, enabling parents to access these real-time updates and alerts anywhere anytime.
The Groupcall Xpressions app provides tangible benefits for teachers, parents and students alike. For the school, it naturally opens communication lines with parents that perhaps have not been there before by facilitating free messaging (Push Messaging) to the app. With the option for automation of information being fed from the school MIS, as well as from dozens of ‘third party’ partner systems that a school may be using, it allows the school to involve parents in the detail of their children’s learning with virtually no additional effort.
For parents, they can be as involved as they feel they need or wish to, but having all the information about their child’s progress delivered to them in a clean, easy to use interface. It is free for parents. And for students, anything that gives greater involvement and support to their learning from their parents can only be of benefit!
Project Need
The Groupcall Xpressions app is unlike anything currently available. Some applications provide one or some of the functionality on offer, but some features are unique to Groupcall and the app. The Groupcall Xpressions app is a complete communications hub bringing together automated and personalised messaging to parents, dissemination of their child’s current progress in a live environment from the school’s MIS, and providing additional informative and actionable alerts from other systems that a school has in place. It is this one stop shop idea that is the innovation, and provides all of this to parents. The facility to offer interfaces to additional systems in use by the school is born out of Groupcall’s unparalleled reputation in the education data market and relationship with dozens of leading suppliers of school systems, from library systems to cashless catering systems to homework systems.
Giving this to parents enables a greater degree of involvement with their children’s education, well documented to boost performance and happiness at school. Parent’s no longer need to feel isolated from their child’s school life; greeted with ‘I cannot remember what I did today in English’, but rather can have informed conversations about the progress made or congratulate on the award received that day.
User Experience
We have made the app extremely simple to use, requiring no training; important for schools who wish to deploy this to potentially thousands of parents using different devices, systems and have different competencies. Importantly, there is no sign up process for parents, signing in from day one with valid email addresses and mobile numbers to be known and stored by the school of each parent. The technology does the rest – parents are not being asked to create another username and password, but use credentials they are likely to know and remember already.
The Xpressions Timeline is akin to other timeline style technologies in appearance and interaction, an important design element to enable good user experience and ultimately an increased and prolonged engagement with the app.
Project Marketing
This exciting new service is available to all schools throughout the UK. There isn't anything else similar available in the current market, it is simple to use and engages parents in their child's school life thus increasing parent/school communications. The Xpressions app will be offered to all schools including our existing customer base. At the touch of a button, parents will be able to view information and receive messages about their child in school including the receiving of free messages sent by the school and delivered direct to the parent's mobile device. Updates regarding school partner systems such as homework, catering and library systems, attendance marks, absences, marks, grades, achievement and behavioural records can all be viewed. Using the Xpressions app will completely engage the parents with the school and their child/children too!
Project Privacy
At the core of Groupcall Xpressions a proven, robust, secure application that is used by thousands of people across the UK every day, and has been for 5 years. Utilising the expertise of Groupcall and the other products in their range to securely procure and transfer accurate data to the correct recipients, Groupcall have also included another service to ensure secure access: Groupcall IDaaS. IDaaS is an SSO identity management solution designed specifically for the education sector and is being used across the country by some of the largest educations groups. We believe it to be the best parental SSO solution in education, so Groupcall included this as the sign in and authentication platform for Xpressions. One of the biggest advantages of this, is that as parents utilise more and more school services, services that now or soon also use IDaaS, the same login credentials will also be used there, giving a true SSO experience for parents, which include links and service from the in-app messages received. IDaaS and Xpressions have been built, like all Groupcall products, with data privacy and security the number one priority, and so contain enhanced security facilities to protect data on device and when data is being send from and to the device. Behind the scenes too are tools to ensure that parents only see data about their own children, and no one else.
EdTech
EdTech focuses on how education is changing through technology, changing the way we learn and process knowledge. What will stand out here is those that enhance the learning experience and make a lasting impression.
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