Parent Portal launches to Year 7 parents

I know it has been a while since my last post, and for that I apologise. It has been a truly manic few weeks back focusing on getting technology, protocols, pedagogy and practice right for our launch of the parent portal. I'm going to endeavour to put together some of the key elements we have worked through in recent weeks to see a really successful launch event as we have this evening. I'll make my apologies in advance for any incoherence in the post - final preparations for launch have taken their toll a bit on me this week and I'm somewhat deprived of sleep!

STRUCTURE OF THE PORTAL

I will endeavour to put a video walk through up of our initial parent portal some time during the next two weeks but as a quick summary I will list how we have structured our phase 1 portal. I say phase 1 as I am sure that the portal will develop in the next few weeks, especially when parents start to engage through the discussion forums and start to throw ideas back at us.

My Child Area - Access to MIS data (Currently Attendance, SIMS lesson monitor, SIMS behaviour log). We have stats pages for attendance and behaviour. Attendance statistics can be analysed by day, period and subject. Every parent has a child overview page that summarises key data and allows them to select each child. on this overview page is the current days timetable, attendance summary, list of teachers and news feed.

The news feed is really interesting as it very much takes the feed you might have on Facebook, but is focused on educational content not people. It summarises legal registration sessions, lesson monitor but also when assignments are issued to the child. All a parent has to do to access the assignment is click on the item in the feed. The assignment will open in a new window and by the way that FROG lessons are structured signposted all the resources that are needed for the student. This will help parents support their children in a much more focused way.

We then have a series of information pages - nested pages for our twitter feed, Youtube channel, school day, canteen menu, homework, bus timetables, extra curricular clubs, PTA and governor information, technology to support learning. Parents also have access to online letters (all main letters - year group/trips/whole school are placed on here in pdf format), college calendar, newsletter, discussion forums, parent surveys, college documents (policies etc...), reporting of student absence.

For launch we have not gone mad with discussion forums at all - there is one forum, entitled parent portal, which is for them to chat about the portal, what they think of it, and give the college some honest feedback. We had the first post within 40 minutes of the launch event finishing. Already we are getting excited about directions the portal will take. I think the general concensus of our parents is how can we support our child and help them with their studies, not just accessing data about them so I can see subject specific support forums being developed, along with specific parental support areas for English and Maths in the short term, other subjects to follow.

For those of you who have been following my blog and/or have heard me speak about parental engagement you will know we're passionate about true engagement at Costello, not just presenting data, information at best, to parents, but getting parents more involved in the processes associated with education and learning. This will become evident when you see how our parent portal structure is beginning to evolve.

When you log on to our portal you are greeted with an initial screen that takes parents to the AUP - this is an online copy of the paper AUP they have signed and only appears the first time they log on. FROG keeps an audit of when each parent accepted the T&C (form database) for reference. This method of putting the AUP is excellent, if/when the AUP is updated we can just reissue the page to all parents - simple!

LOGISTICS OF ISSUING USERNAMES/PASSWORDS

This can be a logistical nightmare, so I'll discuss what we have done - having now gone through the process with 1 year group it actually works quite well. We all know that there is a big emphasis on safeguarding, and with current government department legislation on how usernames/passwords can be disseminated (i.e. not using postal systems) it was clear that sending username/passwords out through the post would not cut it at all. So, here is a breakdown of the processes followed.

• Parent accounts set up in FROG - you cannot exported all parental details, including username and password as a csv file for security reasons. We downloaded every parental user, including FROGid, full address, firstname, surname, username, child name(s) as a csv and used some vb to create random (strong) passwords into the csv file. This was then uploaded back to FROG to populate the system with the new generic, yet strong passwords.
• The CSV file created was then used to create the mail merge letters (making sure that we had sorted by parent surname / firstname so that all letters would print in order). Letter had parental address on it.
• Letters printed and split, put in windowed envelope into 5 alphabetical sections to split the work
• Written copy of the Parent Portal AUP inserted into envelopes - these to be signed and returned to school
• Run a launch event for the parent portal for each year group. At beginning of evening 5 staff man the boxes of letters. Parents filter to correct queue with proof of identity and address. This information cross matched against the details on the envelope. Once satisfied of identity staff then give parent letter.
• Most parents opened letters whilst there and duly signed the AUP - we had a drop box out for parents to leave them with us at end of evening.

The fact that we did this has been very well received by parents, they are appreciative of the sensitive nature of the information that can be accessed through these accounts and were fully supportive of the processes we adopted. There were a few positive comments that clearly indicated that parents were impressed with the care we have gone to.

We still have a large percentage of letters to be collected so I will be mass texting all of Y7 parents tomorrow, encouraging them to come in with proof of id/address to collect them. Failing this we can do another hit at our Y7 tutors evening that is in a few weeks time.

Running a launch event for the portal has worked really well, it gives the school the opportunity to do a live demo and really secure their vision in the minds of the parents and help set expectations on how it is to be used. Although not made explicit in what we presented, there is an underlying expectation that parents will use the portal. The evening that was run for Y7 parents was not all about the parent portal it was the first time new Y7 parents have been invited in to the college and they also had a settling in talk-supporting their child as well as the option to attend 5 different workshops that were being hosted.

So, you can look forward to a number of up and coming blog posts about how things are going!

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Parental Engagement - FROG Conference 2009

Many of you will know that this year I presented a session on parental engagement and use of online portals at the FROG National learning platform conference, June 2009. I have been through my presentation again and recorded a screencast (below) for those that missed it.

I hope to be blogging quite a bit more about the development of our parent portal over the next few weeks, the summer term is always a good term for extended work on projects and we will be in a position to roll out our parent portal to all our parents ready for the start of the new academic year in September. Enjoy the video - you might want to get a tea/coffee, it's about 40 mins :)

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Securing success via FROG

Have been having a big think about lots of things today, was at the regional SSAT Heads steering group and we were talking about organisational efficiency, this, combined with an email I received from our examinations officer really got me focused this afternoon on how exams information could get integrated into FROG from SIM's. Like many schools we use SIM's to manage all of our student examination entries. We receive statements of entry from the examination boards that are paper based and get distributed to students for checking. Of course, they promptly loose them, having not transferred information to their diaries. Wouldn't it be great for the system to generate an automated examinations timetable, populate their own diary with this information and maybe help them start to put together a revision schedule. Our KS4 guidance leader is trialling the use of http://www.myrevisionplan.co.uk/with our Y11 students this year. This system helps students create a unique and personalised revision programme based on their examination entries. The concept is a good one, but there are issues with data interchange and management. It would be great to have this kind of functionality within FROG - hmmmm, is this an idea for a widget I wonder? For me, getting students to take ownership of information, identify problems and seek support is part of them developing as independent life-long learners. Putting students in control and encouraging ownership by providing them with access to this type of information would be a big leap forward.

This approach could also be extended to enhance parental engagement. Through the parent portal it would be fantastic for them to see their children's external examination dates inserted into their own personalised diary - identifying both the student and the examination, date, AM/PM. There could also be an examinations tab for parents to visit to get the overview of all the entries for their child. As result are know for various modules (some courses are modular), results could be populated.

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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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Event Elephant

I am always looking at developing systems that can enhance the schools ability to work with wider community groups. Back before christmas we were approached by the SSaT to see if we would like to trail a new online event management service - EventElepant. I am not going to go into huge detail here now as the video (see below) gives a useful insight into the system. What I will say is that the service is great and has a huge amount of potential to start engaging wider community groups, including parents. It takes all the hassle out of managing events and streamlines the whole process, making it possible to put up an event in a matter of minutes. It is certainly something that we are going to give a lot of thought to in terms of how we use it. We recognise potential when we see it and the service definitely has that. Now for the video, so sit back and enjoy!

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Feedback from Parent Focus Group Meeting

The inaugural parent focus group meeting took place last night at the college and was a fantastic event from the college perspective. It will prove extremely useful in shaping where we move developments with the parent portal. What also became evident was that parents are engaged by becoming engaged - if that makes sense!

7 parents attended the evening that ran from 7pm until gone 9pm - I was only expecting to go on for about an hour and a half, but the discussions we got into were extremely interesting - for everyone! The parents represented a cross section of the college community with parents from all year groups being represented and the number present was just right to get some good discussion going. We started by giving parents an overview of FROG from a student's perspective and this immediately confirmed the need to run some sessions on this alone for parents - to develop their understanding of FROG and what it can do. I will be arranging some parent insight sessions on FROG in the new year.

It was clear that parents want more than just an online presence they can visit to get key information. Parents do want to be able to interact on many different levels and get involved with the broader community life at Costello. We started by unpicking what key data/information parents would like to have access to, the following was identified as important:

Student Progress/targets - Parents want access to targets, current working grades/levels but some sort of trend analysis. What is really important is communicating back to parents current targets to facilitate improvement (text comment).

Behaviour - Rewards/Reprimands, along with other positive comments. Not huge amount of detail -just an overview.

Attendance - Pretty much what I thought it would be. Have already discussed this with Jonathan and Craig at FROG. When parents view attendance data they would like to have flagged dates that have unexplained absences so they can send this info to the school via an online form. I.e. parents see exception report and can deal with sorting out reasons.

Key dates for homework assignments/coursework deadlines

Information on Examination courses - exam boards, specifications, past papers etc..

Student timetable

College Calendar - parents would like to be able to export the calendar in different formats (iCAL etc...) so that they can important into their own diaries - thought this was a cool idea.

Interestingly parents are not interested in accessing actual lesson content but having access to project/lesson summaries is more appropriate. For example, a couple of parents talked at length about being able to view student assignments on their diary - when they click on it a simple 2-3 sentence summary of the task is displayed - ideal when the student has not written the task down properly in their diary (HW). Some felt that having access to additional support materials was important to supplement this.

We got into the discussion about different styles of parenting and that actually having some information available to parents could have a negative impact on students and teacher/student relationships. The group felt that students could have access to some privacy settings so that they can decide whether parents can access some elements of content. For example - the discussion that takes places between a teacher and student in terms of feedback is quite private, but a student could decide to allow their parents to see this. Parents agreed that things like attendance/behaviour/grades/progress data would not have privacy settings.

All parents want good quality TWO way communication between themselves and school, a number said that this is one of the key differences between education in the primary and secondary sectors. They want the facility to send notes to students tutors. Ability to contact tutors/teachers directly through the portal - but without necessarily knowing the teachers email address. Parents felt this was important to safeguard staff. To keep things simple they would like to be able to click on a contact subject style button that would bring up a message dialogue box and then send info directly to the relevant teacher (linked to student/subject via MIS). This can open dialogue between parents and staff.

Extra Curricular Activities

These came up on a number of different levels. Parents would like to see an online database of all the clubs available (managed by teachers with basic info) that students can then subscribe to, to attend. But FROG is then used by whoever is running the club to take a register so that parents can check attendance. They felt this was important when some activities might be paid for by parents.

Online discussion forums

These were discussed in quite a lot of detail and seen as having huge potential to engage parents. Parents want to engage with a variety of different formats. Forums where they can engage with each other - parenting support etc... But also forums for feedback and advice on supporting parents. They also felt a parental forum that was Q&A between parents and the senior leadership team was a fantastic idea, with SLT response time targets. It is clear that the majority of parents want to "assist both the school and the student." Parents want discussion forums that teachers do not have access too as well.

Online Booking System for Parents Evenings

This was something that all parents said would be brilliant and would definitely get used every time. When a parents evening is scheduled, parents log on and see the time slots available for the relevant subject staff and can book slots. Print summary of bookings ready for evening - staff do same.

Online Payments

This was something that everyone said. Parents said they would like to be able to make payments for various things through the portal - such as school trips, peri music lessons - even to the extent of cashless catering systems. Parents mentioned that different payment options would be attractive such as Google checkout, paypal as well as PDQ/merchant services. The more I thought about this, the more I am convinced of the value of this service. However, online payment processing does need investigation from a school perspective in terms of how third party systems can link in with our financial systems etc...

Online satisfaction surveys

Parents are keen to support schools by providing feedback to inform strategic planning - whether it be the annual parent survey or other surveys that focus on smaller school improvement projects.

Method of dealing with forgotten password

The login page must have someway of sending a parent an updated password if current one is forgotten. Parents want the system to collect personal email addresses as they are also keen to get info pushed to them, rather than just pulling information by logging onto the portal. In terms of parental engagement this kind of tug of war is important and we'll miss out if we do not address this.

Having thought about this overnight I think parents should have a profile page (bits of which they could make public etc..) but we ensure they enter their own email address - it's their responsibility to keep this up to date. This way if password is forgotten we have an email address to automatically generate and send details of replacement too. Parents also quite liked the idea of being able to sign up for different kinds of email alert, rather than having to rely on logging into the portal all the time. This could be managed via this profile page. Think there is a great deal to be learnt from Facebook actually!

All in all a really good meeting - my head is now full of great ideas.

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Parent Portal Focus Group

Have shaped our pilot of Event Elephant around our parent portal and how it will take shape over the next year. I have set up and event using the product which parents will be attending next week. You can have a look here - whole site/event took less than 10 minutes to set up. Event was marketing to parents through newsletter and SMS text, so far I have got a nice group forming ready for the meeting next week. It's going to be very interesting to get the parent dimension.

It would be great to have this kind of functionality within our learning platform for event management, or at least link to other services via OpenAPI. Event Elephant is looking like a very interesting product to enhance parental engagement through facilitating and managing the co-ordination of school events.

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Parental Engagement: Turning Vision into Reality

I've been putting a great deal of thinking into the parent portal and reading through the Becta toolkit has stimulated an awful lot of thought in terms of what a parent portal should look like, key functionality and how it may be presented to parents. It's got me thinking about how important it is to end up with a system that is continually used by parents - has enough hooks to make sure they keep coming back for more. At Costello we are not wanting to rush into the launch of a fully fledged parent portal that sees a rush of parents clambering to access the portal, only to log on once and then never return.

As a result we're not rushing, we're taking our time, doing our market research to ensure we end up with a solution that's going to work by supporting our parents and giving them something they want to engage with and use on a regular basis. Our newsletter went out last week, I put in a big article about FROG, securing the vision of where E-Learning is going at the college as well as a request to set up a parent focus group. This focus group has a clear brief, to give parents the opportunity to help shape the vision that will drive the parent portal forward. It's going to be really interesting what gets discussed and how things may well be prioritised differently by parents.

Response has been good, with a number of parents emailing me to express their interest over the past few days - using our SMS texting service to remind parents of the opportunity certainly helped to bring in the responses - proves a point about technology facilitating collaboration and enhancing communication.

Initial meeting is going to me 2nd December and I'm going into this meeting with a totally open mind, at no point are they going to be steered at all. The meeting is going to start at 7pm and will start with an overview of the FROG implementation that our students have. We'll then give an overview of what we are wanting to achieve and outline the format of the meeting, which I expect to last for about an hour -maybe more if they really get stuck in! Am looking forward to posting the outcomes of the meeting!

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Useful websites - Parental Engagement

Some useful websites on parental engagement:
Becta

“Engaging Parents in raising Achievement: Do Parents Know they Matter?”

“The Impact of Parental Involvement, Parental Support and Family
Education on Pupil Achievement and Adjustment: A Review of Literature.”

An Ofsted survey: “Parental Involvement in Children’s Education (PICE) Survey (2007).”

The Children’s Plan: building brighter futures (Dec 2007)

Enjoy :)

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Exploiting ICT to improve parental engagement, moving towards online reporting: Toolkit

Yes, all research does point to parents being able to have a positive impact on student attainment - it's official. The Becta toolkit (published May 2008) outlines how parents can and do have a positive impact on their children's attainment at school. It is all about how we can get parents more involved in this process cloud called education. I think there is a link between the experience that parents had at school and those experienced by their children. The challenge in theory, is a simple one - how can we get more parents to engage in their children's education, more of the time. How can we put them in the driving seat to pull information when they want it to help foster a true working partnership, seeing parents setting and securing high aspirations for the futures of their children. It is about educating parents about education, giving them access to information that they can use to reinforce expectations at home but about empowering them to work collaboratively with their children and teachers - even other parents. How much of this are we going to be able to do with Web 3.0 - really exciting times ahead.

What I found really interesting by reading this document is that there seems to be quite a large emphasis on pushing information out, with some two-way communication of information. Personally I think the key point here is being missed, it is not just about information but interaction and setting opportunities for broader collaboration. The Children's Plan states - 'receive and access information about their children’s work, progress, attendance and behaviour when and where they want'. But it is this and so much more, is it all about receiving and accessing information? I question whether what would be presented to parents is actually information in the first place, isn't it data? Information is data that has been processed, data is raw facts and figures. What is so important is that whatever data we produce for parents is processed in such a way that it is meaningful information. Just having some obscure percentage attendance data for example, may not really be very useful for a parent. It needs putting into context and interpreting, often into layman terms so that we are inclusive. Your son's current attendance of 85% is below the school average, over the course of 5 years this is the equivalent of missing x weeks of school - is far more useful for a parent than just a percentage alone.

There has always been this triad relationship in education between institutions, students and their parents and current technology should be underpinning the foundations of this 3 way relationship. When this is done successfully pay back is huge, there is a strong, underlying learning community - all parties can access and interpret information but it is also putting parents in the driving seat that little bit more to secure improvement - not just for their children but for the whole school through extended collaboration and involvement in broader improvement projects.

Within the toolkit there is a nice diagram (Section1:4) that did hit a chord with me and that was that whatever is done needs to be timely, manageable and meaningful - exactly what is taught within many an A-level ICT course for system requirements. I think these are very pertinent and can be used as a useful steer when opening up the whole conversation about functionality and key requirements of a parent portal. Something that I will endeavour to remember when developing future posts on this topic.

Without getting into really detailed discussion about the component parts of a parent portal the underlying core values that will be communicated through a strategic vision can be fairly easy to list - I am really interested to see what you think on this, so please feel free to leave comments.

Benefits to parents

• In control, they decide what they want see and when
• Data is turned into useful information that is easy for parents to understand and interpret
• Parents develop a deeper understanding of the educational experience their children have
• They feel empowered - opportunities to collaborate and get more involved with the school
• Enhanced capacity to support their children's education
• Enhanced dialogue with teaching staff
• Direct support to help raise their child's achievement
• Engagement with community learning projects
• Access to resources to help shape their understanding of their role - parents play a very important within education

Benefits to school

• Improved dialogue with parents
• Enhanced parent support
• Enhanced parental engagement that will enable parents to impact more on whole school improvement projects
• Parents feel empowered to make more of a difference
• More efficient workflows for administration
• Enhanced communication between home and school
• Seamless integration using IT systems
• Teachers with more time to focus on delivering high quality lessons
• Re-focus parent consultation evenings
• Sustainable schools - less paper!
• Open up more opportunities - family learning etc

Benefits to learners

• Showcase work to parents
• Enhanced support at home - parents in position to be more supportive, be more positive with praise and take an interest. This leads to improved motivation and engagement
• Developing systems that address the way in which they interact with modern society
• E-Learning engages learners, providing them with tools to access the world of collaborative work and sharing of ideas on the Internet

Benefits to broader community

• Effective marketing and administration of community learning opportunities
• Enhanced social networking through the parent portal - e.g. discussion forums for parents to engage in
  

I'm sure that I will be putting some posts together that try and capture the key functionality of a parent portal over the next few weeks so watch this space.

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