If you’re a Moodle user, communication will be at the heart of teaching, learning and the basis of a strong school community; particularly if you use EduLink, with the built in Communicator app, which takes parent-student-school communication one step further.
EduLink allows easy access to your school’s MIS system. Currently it’s available for users of SIMS and CMIS, with further integrations in the pipeline. It’s a ‘front end’ tool, if you like, that presents the information within the MIS system in a way that’s easy to search, retrieve and use.
The EduLink Communicator is a tool that pulls contact data from your school’s MIS system. If you think of your MIS system as the address book, Communicator is the messaging system, and allows you to contact any student, parent or member of staff – either sending to a single contact, or multiple contacts in one go.
That’s a basic overview; Communicator goes much further than that.
You can access contact information instantly
Because Communicator connects directly to your MIS system, once the message you wish to send has been composed, students can be searched for and filtered out by class or year group. Then along with the contact details for the student, you can include any relevant parents or teachers in the message too – they’re ‘linked’ within the MIS system so are easy to include within Communicator messages.
The application is ideal on those occasions when you need to contact students, staff or parents quickly – like, for example, school closures. Within minutes, you can have a message composed and sent to all the students and their parents.
EduLink Communicator can reduce costs
How many schools still engage with parents via written letters? The number is reducing all the time. Moving to a paperless system not only solves the issue of letters being left in students’ bags for weeks on end – or, worse, getting lost somewhere between school and home – it can also reduce costs.
No more endless paper costs and ink cartridge costs – in fact, it could reduce the cost of printer rental to your school, too. Think of what that’ll do to your ‘green’ credentials!
It’s an easy to use communication tool
Communicator allows messages to be sent via SMS and/or email – again vastly reducing the chances of being lost or misplaced.
The opportunities for increased parental engagement can prove invaluable to teaching staff. For example, involving parents in school events or students’ learning is easier because it just requires a few minutes composing a message, and then selecting the relevant students and parents.
Communicating with parents regularly and involving them in their child’s learning is widely understood to positively affect a student’s learning outcomes. Plus, it allows you to build a stronger school community.
It works with Moodle
Communicator can be fully integrated with the Moodle interface, allowing your Moodle system to be automatically populated with the details of students and staff. No need to add in Moodle users manually when you’re setting up an LMS in your school for the first time.
With access to all student data, as well as relevant staff and parents, you can deliver a much more personalised learning experience for your school, providing course access to students within a given criteria range.
Integrating EduLink and Communicator with Moodle means student and staff accounts are fully synchronised – a hugely beneficial tool for staff, who can then access both curriculum and management information through one system, with a single sign-in.
If you want to improve communication in your school, and you want to communicate with students, parents and staff effectively and in ways that will help to improve students’ school experience, please get in touch.
