The new academic year is almost upon us and our teachers and students are preparing to head back to school. The team at Skooler have spent the summer adding some great new features including a focus on building home - school communications and collaboration.
Read here Parent Communication just got easier with OneNote and Skooler
So, what's new for schools using Skooler with Office 365?
Week Plans
From Monday 14 August there will be an additional feature in the menu called «Week Plans». This is a feature that makes weekly scheduling a very simple task.
(Image: Teacher Dashboard with menu on the left)
With this feature, Skooler provides a facility for the teacher to not only use their own weekly plan, but have a single system to share with Students, Parents and other Teachers.
Here’s an example of the new week plan feature:
On the front page, you will see an overview of previous week plans distributed to the students. By clicking on one of the previous plans, you can stop publishing should you need to edit.
When the time has come to create a new week plan, you have several options in the menu such as week number, number of weeks, opportunity to upload files, add links and add competence goals.
Notifications
We have also introduced a messaging service this summer, built inside Skooler. Pulling data from the MIS (SIS), this service allows the teacher to send messages to Parents. These may be informative messages, or messages that require feedback from the parent. Parents can respond based on the option the Teacher sets (E.g. "I've read" or "Yes" / "No").
When the Teacher clicks on "Messages" they will have an overview of all messages published or saved as draft.
Teacher’s view:
Parent's view:
Parents clicks on the message to view content and respond.
OneNote Class Notebooks
Under the menu "Assignments & Assessments" you will now find an additional feature called Class Notebooks.
This feature has been designed to allow you, the Teacher to easily provide Parents access to the Content Library and their child's student notebook in OneNote Class Notebook. Previously, teachers shared a viewing link that OneNote manually creates for Parents - Skooler now makes this easier for Teachers and Parents!
When you click on "Class Notebooks", Skooler will show you a list of Class Notebooks you have created. You can share either Content Library, Student Books or both.
Parents have their own menu in the Parent portal where they can easily find their childs Class Notebooks the Teacher has chosen to share.
Class Seating Chart
You can find our new Class seating chart under the "Class Lists" menu
This is a simple, but often a missing tool in the classroom. Some schools have invested in a standalone App. Here you access as part of the Skooler package. Design your classroom layout by entering the number of desks in rows and columns – with a drag and drop facility, you can move your students around, positioning them where they work best.
This feature will also enable temporary staff to enter a classroom and get an overview of the students' names.
General Updates
In addition to the new features, we have improved the back end to provide a better user experience for Teacher’s, Student’s and Parent’s.
We hope you have enjoyed this very quick overview of the new features coming to Skooler. We shall cover each functionality in more detail in the weeks to follow.
If you would like to see these features working alongside Office365 in an online demonstration please get in contact. Schools serious about reducing costs and saving time whilst building on home-school communications can add Skooler, next generation in Learning Management Systems. Remove standalone LMS/VLEs and get more from Office 365. Everything you need in one application!
#Backtoschool Offer - What's more, follow @SkoolerUK or @SkoolerUS on Twitter throughout August & September to be in with a chance to win Skooler for your school.
Click on the link below to request a free trial: