6 Ways to Technology Has Improved Education
March 7, 2021What to Look For in a Good School Management System
March 21, 2021If you’re a proprietor or administrator of a school or similar establishments, you might have been deliberating whether a management system is for you. Well, that’s a good thing. Because you’re a step closer to finally realizing just how helpful the system can be.
A lot of the processes and actions that are necessary for the day to day running of a school can be easily abstracted and automated. That’s where technology shines.
One erroneous assumption people have about school management system is that they believe it’s just for keeping records. As we will discover, it’s a software that does much more than that. In general, it’s software that eases the tasks of admins, staffs, students, and even parents through its multiplatform and multi-purpose nature.
Below, we have highlighted the challenges faced by schools and how management software can help solve those problems.
- Saves Time, Effort and Energy of Teachers and Administrators: As with any automation system, they are designed primarily to save time and effort for its users. Administration can be a very time-consuming task, most of which are tasks that needs to be carried out daily. Time-consuming tasks like time-table creation, attendance taking, parent-teachers conference planning and biometric capture can be automated, saving precious time for teachers and staff to focus on other things.
- Easy and Efficient Attendance Recording: A school management system helps you take and keep student and staff’s attendance record easily and efficiently. A very notable feature of such systems is that they can allow you to create attendance reports per classes, grade, level, course, gender, and any other variables you can imagine.
The right people easily have access to these records and can easily manipulate and make sense of the data because they are in digital form. Using pen and paper for such a task takes a considerable amount of time and energy. A school management system can free up time for your staff to educate your students.
- Streamlined Test, and Assignment Delivery: Depending on your administrative policy, students can have access to some features that the school management software provides. One of such is files/content delivery.
Normally, interactions between students and teachers happen frequently. One of such occasions is during tests and homework projects. A capable school management software includes interfaces for uploading and downloading files such as text document, images, notes, audio and videos. Students can easily have access to present and past documents on the go.
- Centralised and Effective Communication Channel: Even though it may not be your primary mode of communication, the fact that admins, parents, teachers, and students are key users is telling.
With the system, you can easily send appropriate notifications and updates to all concerned about the activities happening in the school. Also, you can be very sure that the right information gets to everyone and on time – as long as they’re captured in the system.
Never have to worry about leaving any student or parent out of an important meeting or update. Most of these solutions are equipped with Short Messaging Service (SMS) for instant communication. Also, more and more solution have mobile apps which greatly aids communication.
- Helps Decision Making Processes: One of the major advantages of a school management system is that it provides data, information, and stats simply and concisely. In a way which helps decision-makers make sense of the data and take decisive actions.
Of course, these reports can exist in several forms and the data can be transformed into visual forms like charts and graphs which are easier to analyse.
- Grade Generation and Reporting: With simply inputs and configurations, schools can automate the grade generation and reporting processes. Students are registered for courses they are eligible for and after the exams, teachers update students performance under the corresponding courses.
The software is capable of generating report cards for each course and each student profile. This is done using a predefined template, which is configured on the system.
- Fee Collection and Receipt Generation: The school management has the option of collecting school fee payment and other levies through the software. This is possible because a good school management software has the right interfaces to integrate a payment gateway. Which mean parents can conveniently pay their fees from the comfort of their homes. No need to queue up at the bank.
This can be the ideal method since all the students are captured in the database already. And it will certainly help administrators identify does who have fulfilled their obligations, and those whose parent needs reminding or follow up.
- Helps for Budgeting Purposes: Typically, a budget will be drawn up for a full operating year or monthly. Whatever the duration of the plan is, to have any chance of creating a good budget, some important data has to be taking into account. One good place to look for those important numbers is in the school management system’s database. Data like the number of student you have, materials they’ll need, expected expenses per head, and other items under the ‘expenditure’ column can be gotten from the system’s records.
Other records like individual payment history and last year’s income and expenses can help you project estimates for the coming year.
- Helps Keeps Parents Informed: It’s important to keep parents and guardians informed about how their wards are faring at school. Take the attendance recording, for instance, if parents have access to these records, they can immediately assure themselves that their children are in school indeed. Other information such as test and assignment performance, behavioural report cards, and fee payment can and should easily be accessed by parents. This helps them know the strengths and weaknesses of their kids and enable them to make necessary adjustments.