Managing a primary school is a challenging duty. And that’s because, as the head of a school that enrolls young children, you and the faculty staff are responsible for their development; and their safety, as well. But, how can you use School Information Management Systems in primary schools?
To achieve all these goals, all paper-based processes, complicated administrative activities and flows of your school should be simplified, first. By making them as seamless as possible, you and your teaching staff can, without distractions, focus on young students’ educational needs and goals. And, with a school information management system in your hands that is, by all means, achievable.
Let’s see exactly how.
What are the core features in school information management systems?
A school information management system comes with a broad list of features. All of them are tailor-made to support your school’s specialized needs; and to facilitate all core school administrative processes and tasks. School Information Management Systems in primary schools are no different. DreamClass, for example, allows you to complete all these processes in a seamless way. Here’s how:
1. Easily create and manage your school’s curriculum, online
With DreamClass, which also identifies as a curriculum management software, curriculum creation is no longer a tedious task. By going paperless, you can easily create your curriculum. Just by adding, editing, deleting and copying courses and classes, until you shape the appropriate structure. You can also share your curriculum hierarchy with teachers; and add them as a kind of contributors, in a way to have a cooperative outcome, for your school’s benefit. And that’s how you can be better off using School Information Management Systems in primary schools.
2. Effortlessly run your whole enrollment process
Release your school from struggles related to the enrollment process, such as racing to meet deadlines and keeping parents and guardians informed. Not to mention, dealing with the overhead of repetitive work that could be automated. Digitize all student data, eliminate errors in application forms and be rid of all the paperwork that comes with all that tedious record keeping. Using School Information Management Systems in primary schools for your enrollment process will make it a breeze.
3. Manage classes and classrooms from your screen
School information management systems in primary schools, will help you bring your curriculum to life. Just as they would in any other type of school. How? Well, once you have your curriculum prepared, you can organize your classes and your classrooms around it. You can assign teachers to classes, distribute students to classes and map classes to available classrooms. All of these tasks can be easily completed in a few clicks, from your screen; and, as a bonus, keeping teachers and students up-to-date becomes a snap.
4. Have all of your attendance records easily stored, online
Attendance record-keeping and management is made really simple. And it makes student attendance supervision more manageable. Instead of having your teachers fill in attendance papers, they can alternatively perform attendance checks, online. By registering absentee students electronically, this allows for administrators — or any person in charge — to be in the know; and then, further inform parents or guardians. This capability of school information management systems in primary schools, apart from saving time for teachers, it also allows them to conduct their lessons with peace of mind.
5. Manage payments and tuition fees like an accountant
You can have all of your students’ tuition fees saved on your system. And you will know exactly which pending payments need to receive a reminder, to take further action.
6. Easily communicate with parents when needed
Keep all parents and guardians updated, regarding their children’s issues. Allow for students or administrators to send them notifications on important issues that have to do with their children. Such as, absenteeism or upcoming parents briefing invitations.
All the features mentioned above are, of course, basic school administrative tasks that schools of all types need to complete, one way or another. But, for primary schools, such as the one you probably run or work at, things are quite different. And we’d like to explain why such functionalities offered by school information management systems are more critical for primary schools.
Why are these processes so critical for primary schools?
As mentioned, primary school principals and faculty staff are mainly responsible for children’s safety. That comes first. And then it’s all about making their best efforts to offer meaningful teaching and enhance the learning process. A prerequisite to all these outcomes is to effectively deal with a large number of challenges. Such as, minimizing distraction, handling tardy students and many more, as needed. School Information Management Systems, on the other hand, help in that direction by effectively resolving such issues that encumber educators’ work. Here’s how:
1. Online classroom management helps avoid useless transitions
Since young students are quite hard to “coordinate”, it helps a lot to have all classroom data available online. More specifically, all of your teaching staff can check the availability of lab rooms, gyms and all of your classrooms. By doing so, teachers can have access to this information from their laptop early on, and are able to guide students accordingly. This helps reduce any useless transitions between classes. Note here that this feature is really critical. Especially for social distancing. Reducing the number of students that attend, breaking classes down to smaller groups, means you have more groups of students to manage and coordinate.
2. Release teachers from tedious and complicated bureaucracy and extra work
Teachers act “in loco parentis”. That means they are responsible for children in place of their parents or guardians. And, of course, no one can deny that students’ safety is more important than updating attendance logs or any other bureaucratic process. With school information management systems, this is no longer a problem. Teachers can easily fill in just a few quick entries and focus on their teaching process.
By doing so, the data stored online are already accessible by administrators or any other person responsible to further contact parents, when needed. And that is of great importance, since students are too young. They most probably need guidance, even on basic tasks. Put differently, your students need to have the teacher’s full attention. And by establishing a process that takes care of these bureaucratic tasks, allows for teachers to be fully devoted to their students.
3. Establishing more efficient processes —different roles mapped with different access rights
Even if there is a dedicated administrative personnel, having a full-featured system that makes management more efficient, takes your primary school to the next level. And that’s because school information management systems such as DreamClass offer a variety of features, with different access rights based on the role of each user. For example, teachers can add attendance records, and send notifications to parents; whilst administrative personnel have access to more advanced features and to faculty records.
4. Discreetly and effectively notify parents and guardians regarding due payments
Apart from the fact that school information management systems such as DreamClass helps you have all of your payments fully organized, they can also support fee collection. More specifically, sending notifications to parents about pending payments allows for easy, direct and discrete communication on such a critical aspect for smooth school operation. At least, compared to traditional mailing that will be probably lost. And, of course, assigning young students to deliver the respective notice, which is not a reliable way to get it in the parent’s hands.
5. Be remote-ready and re-open with confidence
All schools should be remote-ready, in light of the coronavirus pandemic. And even if there is no such need, being flexible on how you can manage your school from a distance is really important. No matter how the situation with the coronavirus will develop, it would be wiser to be prepared and handle challenges with prudence.
With a school information management system for primary schools in place, switching from open to temporarily suspending operations won’t be that challenging for you. Having all of your data stored on a system that requires no support, no maintenance on your part and is accessible to all faculty from anywhere, will certainly prove to be a wise decision. All the features described above and, most notably, the communication channel with parents, to keep them updated regarding your decisions, are of utmost importance. Especially, those that will have to comply with the government’s mandates, once announced.
Choose the right school information management system for your primary school
All in all, School Information Management Systems for primary schools come with a wide list of features that help transform primary schools in a really positive way. DreamClass is a cost-effective solution that offers all the benefits you need. Try it for Free till the end of September and get your primary school off the ground.
