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Return to school: How epraise can help part 2

Over the last year schools around the world have had to adapt quickly to the ever-changing situation presented by the spread of coronavirus. They have had to rapidly adopt systems to help support their school communities under unprecedented circumstances. With the return to school in the UK for most next week, schools are continuing to utilise and adapt technology to help them with the critical task of maintaining staff and student safety, health and wellbeing…

Staff profile picture Staff profile picture Kelsey de Beer & Tracey DraperMarch 2021 - 4 minute read

Parents’ evenings and COVID testing

With increased student numbers in school, this feature provides a method for schools to organise their COVID testing days, allowing parents to book their child for a specific test time slot.

The financial effects of this pandemic will be felt for a long time and many families are facing great hardship. Some schools have set up uniform drop-ins to source help or second-hand uniform and enabled parents to request a drop-in session.

Setting up student support events enables students to book in a time to speak to a relevant subject teacher about any areas where they feel they need extra help.


Parent teaching child

Messenger and Forms

With ever-changing guidance for schools, timely communication with the school community has been absolutely essential over the course of the COVID pandemic.

Our schools utilised Messenger tools on epraise to communicate with their staff, teachers and parents in a way that most suited their requirements. During such demanding times, open times and conversation quotas could be deployed in an effort to protect teacher wellbeing.

We were seeing Forms being utilised by schools to obtain all kinds of data such as meal choices in advance from pupils to ensure lunches could be organised according to social distancing guidelines.

Currently Forms is providing a straightforward way to obtain permission for COVID testing from parents, collating their responses and ensuring ease of use throughout each stage.


Parent teaching child

Homework and quizzes

Having a platform to share tasks and feedback with students has been invaluable to schools. We saw massive increases in usage during the last year and developed tools such as self-marking quizzes to help teachers quickly assess gaps in knowledge within topic areas.

With a parallel curriculum set to continue for some time, our homework and classwork submission tools will continue to support this approach.


Parent teaching child

Conclusion

Longer term, many of the transformations we’ve seen during lockdown will become a more permanent fixture in school life. Many of us had never used online chat or meeting software prior to this pandemic, yet people rapidly adopted these tools to enable them to keep in touch with loved ones around the world.

Many schools have expressed that parents and carers have enjoyed the flexibility of being able to attend parents’ evenings via the virtual room on their epraise schedule, especially when work commitments mean that travel to school is difficult. We expect to see more flexible attendance methods at school events continuing into the future.

During lockdown parents and guardians have had unprecedented involvement and insight into school life and we have been impressed and humbled by the work school staff have been doing to help keep children on track academically and keeping well physically and mentally during a most difficult time for all.

We wish you all well during the coming weeks as we all continue adapt to these ever-changing times.

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