Blogs

March 2, 2013

School Directory Production

School Directory Production can be a torturous process I was talking to the “PTA ex-Directory Chair” in one of the Elementary Schools about the school directory process in her district. She told me that after three years of producing the school directory for her elementary school, she was “BURNED OUT” and stepped down last year. Let me call her Mrs. Directory Chair. Mrs. Directory Chair was very frustrated about the problems she faced in the school. They used archaic systems to collect the information, namely paper forms. Although the district collected the information, they would not give her the updates she needed for the existing parents. This was in part due to the “privacy policy”. Each time she would walk into the office to get some information, they would ask her for all her details ALL OVER again. And she was visiting them three to four times a week! Although […]
January 22, 2013

School Directory App invaluable tool for parents

Why do parents need a mobile school directory? All parents are always balancing their commitments to work and other responsibilities with their children’s activities and school events. Their school directory and calendar is an invaluable tool for them to communicate with other parents in their child’s class/school/sports team. Parents are mobile and on the run dropping and picking up kids at various activities. However most of the schools do not publish a mobile school directory. The school directories continue to be printed on paper. Take the case of Allison, a working Mom with 2 children in elementary school who lives in our neighborhood. She relies heavily on her babysitter to pick up the children from the school at 3 and take care of them until she comes home in the evening. When Allison’s babysitter’s car breaks down, she has to find someone to pick up her kids and keep them […]
December 20, 2012

Mobile and Online School Directory for School Parents – Top Ten Reasons

Do we use the printed copies of the Yellow Pages? Years ago, after search engines like Yahoo, Google and Bing put businesses on the internet highway, the paper Yellow pages have grown extinct. We no longer refer to the paper directory as much as our mobile apps or the online white and yellow pages. Our schools however continue to churn out a paper directory year after year after year. A Mobile and Online Directory is not common yet.  Schools are generally cautious in their approach to technology and rightfully so. However, we offer several compelling reasons to adopt a mobile school directory below. The school directory contains the contact information of all the parents, teachers and staff in the school, the school calendar and the school rules/regulations. Here are Top Ten simple reasons to move all of the directory information to a mobile and online directory. 10. Updated Real time […]
December 4, 2012

Mobile and Online School Directory App Helps Parents in a time crunch

Why did we build this mobile and online school directory app? Parent Teacher Organizations build a school directory for the parents in their school using simple tools – Microsoft Excel and Word mostly. Some of them use a directory software tool which needs knowledge of some programming/building macros and still requires several hundreds of hours of work massaging the data. At the end of this time consuming exercise, the print directory is out of date almost immediately, as some new families have joined the school, some of the parents have changed their phone numbers or address. Mobile and Online School Directory Apps can solve all of these issues. My PTA goes through the same process each year. They collect addresses/phone numbers/get permission slips from parents, all of which can be automated on the web. I developed a mobile school directory app, MobileArq, to solve this issue for PTAs/PTOs/HSAs. To solve […]