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Epraise is constantly changing and improving, so there are far too many features to list. On this page, we've chosen some of our favourites to tell you about, but if you'd like to learn about the other features not mentioned here, why not book a demo?
Motivating students is at the heart of everything we do; without motivated students, how can you teach? We've created a number of features that help recognise student achievement, which is an incredibly powerful way of motivating students.
Praise points are the most important part of this and can be awarded in a variety of ways - they are the backbone of epraise and where it all started. When you want to go further than awarding points, our digital badges are great for recognising some of the 'bigger' things that students do and take part in. Some of these are awarded by teachers, others are automatically awarded when students reach a goal such as achieving a certain number of points.
Our student biographies allow students to record their own achievements; often things that teachers don't get to hear about. It acts a bit like a CV and can be continually updated throughout their time in school.
One of the most important tools in a teacher's arsenal, is a seating plan. It is a huge boost to behaviour management and it's no secret that classrooms with better behaved students are better learning environments. Before we built our seating plan feature, lots of our teachers were putting these together in documents or spreadsheets, which took hours! We're all about saving teacher's time, so we created something that allows them to put together a seating plan in seconds, including photographs and useful data such as pupil premium indicators.
Once students have obtained points for their hard work, schools often want to reward them. We've got three ways for students to spend points in epraise: the shop where they purchase things for themselves; the prize draws page where they can enter a draw for a chance to win; and the charitable donations page where they can donate their points instead. Schools have full control over the items, prizes and charities on offer. We've seen some brilliant ideas for how these can be used such as 20 minutes with an RC car at lunchtime, or access to a whizz bang science club.
Many schools put competition at the forefront of their rewards system, as it's a great way to motivate students to work that little bit harder. In epraise, students can work together to compete across houses (think Harry Potter). Points can be awarded to both individuals and houses, which is handy for events such as sports day.
Leaderboards allow students to see how many points they need to overtake their friends. Many schools love the buzz that comes with competititon in schools, however, like many aspects of epraise, you can always switch these features off if you don't want it.
We want to help you encourage students to get involved in activities both in and out of school, so we built the Activities feature. It's makes it really easy to promote extra-curricular activities and manage them more effectively with registers, fixtures and teamsheets. We've integrated this with all our other great tools, so you can award points for participation or set up your squad positions for the next match using a seating plan. Whether you run an after-school rugby club or want some student helpers for a parents' evening, this feature is perfect for you and it's part of the basic epraise subscription.
In recent years, student wellbeing has become an even bigger concern for schools and we're doing everything we can to try and help. Features such as report an incident, which allows students to tell you about any issues they are experiencing are a great way to help ensure your school is supporting your students through whatever tough times they are experiencing. Our forms functionality (part of messenger) allows you to survey your students to make sure they have everything they need to make their time at school a success.
Along with monitoring student achievement, we also recognise the need to record negative behaviour. Our demerits feature enables teachers to give out negative points against a selection of categories designed by their school, optionally recording the incident details and consequence given. School leadership teams can then carefully track and monitor the negative behaviour over time and by group, allowing them to carefully plan interventions backed up by meaningful evidence. Parents can also be allowed access to this information, meaning they can have a conversation with their son or daughter the very same day.
Alongside demerits staff are able to set and monitor detentions as part of our interventions feature. We've divided interventions into two types: sanction and support. Sanctions all have a severity, are generally set after a demerit and can be escalated when students don't attend. Support interventions are the go to place for SENCOs and SLT when it comes to recording support for students, which might include external assessments, internal meetings or just a simple phone call home.
As a middle or senior leader, you need to make a lot of decisions, but it can be difficult to make well-informed data-driven decisions without spending hours in a spreadsheet. Our Overviews take a lot of that hard work away, by setting out some of the key data insights you need. This works for points, demerits, interventions, attendance, homework, classwork, messenger and parents' evenings, with insights by individuals, subjects, categories, year groups, tutor groups and more. And, if you still want to roll up your sleeves in a spreadsheet, we make that even easier with our data exports.
We believe that parental communication is one of the least-utilised and yet most powerful ways to improve student outcomes. After the success of our parents' evening feature, we wanted to build upon the progress we had helped schools make in improving parental communication and came up with the idea of epraise Messenger. Not only will this help you communicate more effectively with parents, but it will also help with getting messages and important information out to students and teachers too. It's so much better than email or anything else you may have used before!
Parents' evenings are a wonderful opportunity to engage with parents, however they can be difficult to organise and even more difficult to analyse. Our parents' evening feature takes away a lot of the hassle and makes it incredibly easy to arrange appointments whether you're a student, parent or teacher. On the night, teachers get an incredibly useful live-view that provides single-click access to the student's details. Afterwards the school leadership team can use our overviews to monitor how well the parents' evening has been attended across key groups, allowing them to make informed decisions on how to better support students.
Several of our schools asked us to put together a feature for tracking homework, so that students, teachers and parents could use a single platform rather than several different ones. In 2015, we launched our homework feature and it's been a massive success. As it's an optional feature for epraise we've dedicated a whole page to it, so to find out more click on the button below.
For schools using SIMS, Epraise allows you to take registers within epraise and reduce the need for teachers to use your MIS. Take the register on any device, anywhere inside or outside the school. It's incredibly quick and easy to use and saves teachers a huge amount of time. Attendance administrators are also given access to a great new overview, allowing them to easily identify absent or late students plus missing marks across classes and registration groups.
Our MIS link feature allows epraise to receive daily updates of your data, including students, staff, classes, attendance, achievements, behaviour, assessment, timetables and photographs.
If you use SIMS, you also have the option of our 'MIS writeback' feature, which will write back points and demerits that students are awarded in epraise back into your MIS. As part of this, you can also take both session and lesson attendance, making epraise the only thing a teacher needs in the classroom.
We know how important it is for staff and students to be able to easily login, so we've come up with a way for schools to integrate their epraise logins with Microsoft and Google. We've made the process extremely easy and we take care of the linking between your MIS data and login data ourselves. Parent logins are also really simple in epraise - just provide us with their email address (via your MIS or a CSV file) and they'll be able to request a login link via our website.
We've come up with some really awesome APIs, that will allow you to do things like put a live stream of behaviour issues up in the year leader's office, or display house points on your website and screens around the school. Choose from pre-made graphs such as a house graph or points by category using our standard APIs, or make up your own using our JSON API - we're more than happy to add more data if you need it. All APIs that contain student names are secured using an API key unique to your school.
