The way education system should be in this era of smart development, is perhaps best put by Jennifer Fleming when she said – “Teaching in the Internet age means we must teach tomorrow’s skills today”.

It is crucial for the cohesive education of today’s children in this age of competition and innovation in every nook and cranny, for the school administration to communicate timely and clearly with the parents and the families of children.

Gone are the days of forging signature in your report cards or even shredding a bad score to pieces to hide from ones parents. These days the advent of technology is changing the face of how parents and teachers are collectively involved in a child’s education for the better.

With great smart phone penetration into the market, schools and parents are realizing the feasibility of having the perfect school management application or software, which will help to communicate and access the school decisions easily by the parents, and make the administration formalities less tiresome for the authorities.

Here are the advantages of using school management mobile apps for parents:

• Offers parents the easiest mode of communication to keep updated with what is going on in school
• The apps also provide a system that ensure parental notes are received on time
• With smart software, one can be relieved of those ‘bad parenting’ days because the apps remind today’s busy parents about special school events
• Informs timely about school days or events called off or cancelled due to rain or other conditions
• They can access the homework information assigned to the children by their teachers
• A direct system of reliable update about the children’s attendance in school, class activities, performance and progress
• Access to parenting and educational articles regularly updated from the schools
• An easy platform for offering feedback to the teachers, school admin, transport provider and even the school principal
• An open discussion forum for parents and teachers with image sharing and messaging features
• The availability of tracking a complaint made to a school department by the parent
• Easy access to the children’s timetable and classroom schedule

The problems with school and parent communication were best highlighted by the case study of a school based in North West Sydney. In order, to alleviate the frustrations amongst parents and the school admin about school activities, events and policy changes to parents a series of strategies were employed. Like:

• A class email list: however, this failed as many shared duplicate information
• E-newsletters: the bounce rate was high as many emails from the parent’s inboxes were undelivered due to wrong IDs or other reasons of non-operation
• A FaceBook group was created for the parents and teachers and school admin to communicate effectively, but still problems with misinformation undermined the good intentions

All of these above mentioned problems were finally resolved with the launch of a school mobile app that was reliable, convenient and easy to access with full-features. Its achievements were:

• 60 percent parents downloaded the app within the first 3 weeks of the launch and availability
• There was exponential rate of approval and regular use of the app for the features of sick notes, newsletter access and more So, it is evident that mobile apps for school management are the way forward for the better of the society as a whole. Also needless to mention, we can also save millions of trees cut down, with adoption of environment friendly alternatives.