Enhancing Community Engagement

EventElephant are one of FROG's partners and I spent some time today in a conference call discussing how the functionality of EventElephant can be secured within FROG and vice versa. One of the topics that came out of the discussion was trying to put a bit more detail on what types of events may be set up with different community groups and what sorts of information flow and online collaboration may be seen as a result. So I have had a think today and come up with some thoughts on the matter:

Parental Events: Huge amount of potential to run all sorts of event under this guise. From parents evenings, to taking payments for non-uniform days, Information Events, Curriculum Evenings, Presentation Evenings. All of these events are quite simple to manage with initial invites and documentation being sent out to parents both before and after the event. These events may have a file area associated with them as well as perhaps a discussion forum for people to collaborate and discuss the event that ran. There may be scope for some events to have online photo galleries, access to video clips, download Powerpoints, PDF's etc - as well as accessing online forms to collect information on the event that they participated in. Parents Evening - Lot's of potential here - through MIS integration parents can accept attendance to the event, but also use the system to book appointments with childs teacher's. Teacher log's on to system to see appointments they have got etc.....Parent access final schedule and pulls student performance data to have ready for the event.

Community Learning Events: Many schools run community events (we hold an annual Robot Day for example) that extend beyond parents. Application forms need to be fully customisable to meet demands of the event, functionality to send out joining instructions with media files. Collating details from people that are not held within any internal MIS systems within the school community that can then be used to promote later events etc...Events should allow attendee's to access photo galleries, video vault, discussion forum - perhaps a comment wall. This may include the functionality for attendee's to upload their own photograph's of work created - this could then be commented/ranked by other attendee's - huge amount of potential here. Ability to send computer generated certificate of attendance would be a great addition.

Community Learning Courses: Similar to above but may be reciprocating events (E.g. a GCSE course running over 30 weeks) - may include public examination courses. Can data be collected to then populate and create a FROG account under a certain group so that assignments can then be delivered to the identified learning community? May have an RSS feed for attendee's to keep in touch with course. These events may have links to course content residing in FROG. Management of payment of course and examination fees. Course evaluations, collaboration between attendee's through forums.

Running INSET/Training Courses: Many more schools are becoming outward looking/thinking schools and the education sector is realising that there is a huge potential for schools to lead training. Schools are starting to put together their own INSET programmes for both free/paid events. These events could be quite complex, possibly spanning multiple days. Confirmation emails with joining instructions that may include rich media resources would go out to delegates prior to the event. Post event as well as the obligatory thank you email they may need to have documents/files pushed out to them but also to complete an online evaluation of the event (online survey) and perhaps have a discussion wall for delegates to post comments about the event - share email addresses and collaborate! Schools will want to data mine delegate information to create their own training/INSET databases for future marketing purposes.

Events engaging local business partners: Great way of collecting data about local businesses that may engage in activities with the school - how can this data be used to create more productive working partnerships with local businesses? Start to populate local business database, businesses collaborating with each other and supporting the school. How can the system help secure, say, sponsorship? Use systems to send out electronic prospectus etc....

A few musings on the topic - may well revisit and update this post over next few days as I go over a few things.

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