When the demand for distance learning increases overnight, good communication between teachers, parents and students is crucial. For theachers, the ability to send important information or impressions from everyday life as text or picture messages from a smartphone or computer to the whole class, individual groups or individual parents is a fundamental pillar to keep activities such as exercises and exams going and to stay connected.
Schools have a specific stakeholder structure unlike other organizations. The resulting communication needs are different, too. This must be reflected in communication tools to make them really useful. Email, Whatsapp, Telegram or other standard messaging solutions are not suitable just because they don't support the specific communication patterns of a school. With our Condense blueprint for Schools we provide a standardized setup concept that can be adapted to any specific requirement and allows us to bring school communications online quickly.
A typical pattern in commercial companies looks like this:
For schools, this pattern common to many commercial companies can't be applied. But there is a different pattern instead:
To cater for these specific needs, we have designed a blueprint configuration that can be applied to a school and be used as starting point for further refinement. Our Condense blueprint for schools is designed to simplify communication between schools, parents and students. It makes the teacher's job of sending important information fast and secure.
(You can find more information about the Condense Employee App on our website at https://www.cycl.ch/en/condense)
Parents and students can confirm messages with one click. Confirmations become immediately visible to the teacher. The time-consuming checking of emails or multiple instant messaging channels is now a thing of the past.
Recipients of a message have the possibility to have it translated into more than 60 languages with one click. This helps you to involve relatives in the everyday school life who otherwise cannot be reached due to lack of language skills.
Parents and teachers have access to student profiles together, which contains important information and contact details for emergencies. Teachers can send alerts to students and parents via push notifications on any smartphone.
Condense not only helps you with school communications, it also supports the secure and simple distribution of more static information, such as schedules, lists of contact persons, address lists, information about special projects, exam dates etc. by class. Likewise, school events can be communicated with a possibility to register (e.g. parents' evenings, 1:1 with parents, ski and summer camps, school trips, project weeks and optional courses).
The entire communication is encrypted and stored in European data centers run by Microsoft. Condense fully complies with GDPR and information is always shared within clearly defined groups (such as a class).
Condense is not only for schools: it is an ideal solution for all groups with group leaders/trainers/educators, where the leaders want to exchange information with the group members (or their parents or legal guardians) quickly, regularly and with little effort.
The communication needs of schools differ in important aspects from the typical "internal communications" of commercial organisations. There is a direct line of communication from school management to teachers, which is comparable to the typical corporate communication. But there are other stakeholders to be involved, such as students and parents. The Condense Communications Blueprint shows how the Condense Employee App is ideally designed to meet the needs of schools, effectively supporting communication across the four groups: school management, teachers, parents and students.
