Friday, April 4, 2008
SchoolCast
One new innovation in school technology is SchoolCast. I'm writing about this today because we are using it today because of the impending bad weather! This is an automated system that calls parents and faculty when there is an early dismissal or school is cancelled. This technology was not available when I started teaching. We had to make phone trees and rely on parents to call other parents of the students in our class. Often the parents couldn't find their phone tree or were unreachable. I would often end up calling most, if not all, of the parents myself. Luckily almost all of the teachers had cell phones and could call from their class (although we had to use up a lot of our minutes). I can't imagine how crazy it would be if we could only call from our school phone lines! SchoolCast has saved us so much time, energy, and money! One downside to SchoolCast is that when all of the systems in the area are using it, the lines can sometimes get jammed up. Then parents don't get notified in a timely manner and teachers end up calling anway. Because of this we have backup phone trees to use if SchoolCast is down. Although it's not perfect and has room to grow I think it's a great improvement to the old system.
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2 comments:
Being an employee from your former school made me chuckle about the dismissal procedures we have to use if there is an emergency. We still have the computer program that allows us to call each and every home, the problem with that is the time factor. We still use it for announcements about school starting, grade alerts or report cards coming out, etc. It is linked into STI and takes about 8 hours to completely contact everyone. I am interested in learning about SchoolCast to see if I can suggest it to our principal.
WE have had to dismiss early at least 3 times this year and it is not the best of circumstances. I do have a great mom that will do all the calling so that is a HUGE help. Only one time did I have to call more than one person.
You should have seen my cell bill that month! ANd the other BAD thing about that is the parents now have my cell number if I couldn't block mine. YUCK!!!!!
Hi
It was interesting to read both of your experiences with schools letting out and how the procedures work, or as the case may be do not work. I have a two year old in day care and I work in the “business world”, so I do not know when schools close. I have to try and catch the news and some of us in the office rely on each other if we get calls. I love my daycare, but they do not call. I do not ever remember going home early because of storms, and when I was in school a lot less parents work then they do today. It surprises me that all the parents have to figure out how to miss work and get their children with usually less than a one hour notice. I also wonder how safe it really is to have all the parents with their kids on the roads with potential tornadoes in the area? I believe it was James Span that mentioned on the news that some children were being sent up to trailers and that was much less safe than being in a school building.
I have never heard of School Cast. I thought that the technology sounds like a good idea, but it seems like it may not work as well as anticipated. I wonder if emails or text message may also be a possibility? If several methods of communication were used then maybe one of the messages would get through. I find it sad that teachers have to run up their cell phone bills, which is just another case of teachers paying for things that the public does not consider. I am glad to hear that the phone trees are still in place as a backup plan, often times we rely too much on technology. I am also amazed sometimes how technology is supposed to be “better”. For example time savings; however the other day I wanted to wish my step mother happy birthday and I had to leave 3 messages, one on the home answering machine, one on her work voice mail, and yet another on her cell voicemail. I have to remember or have stored in my phone three different numbers, make three different calls, and I never did get to actually talk to her. Another example is that with computers we are supposed to have less paper. However, now I have more things to keep up with because you need to remember where you saved the file, what you called it, possibly what the password is, and still print out a hard copy in case you lose the information from the computer. I have more files then I ever had keeping up with all the computer prints outs!
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