Interactive and Responsive School Calendars
Are key dates and other items included in your schools calendar easily accessible?
You may, like 80% of the schools in the UK, be using SIMS as the management information system to help with the day-to-day running of your school (looks like we have a monopoly on our hands!!... props for standardisation of course). Depending on what level of integration your school decides to have with this system - e.g. parents being able to access a secure login and finding out all the relevant information relating to their children’s academic life in ‘real-time’ – you may want to consider how accessible and functional the calendar is on your main school website. It is often the first port of call to find out key dates and other updates on the goings on at your school.
One option we feel is particularly useful for the end user, whatever their level of technical ability, in finding out information about school events, is having an interactive calendar which produces personalised results based on entering queries in two main ways.
1. A text search query – e.g. ‘hockey match’
2. Clicking on colour-coded tabs – e.g. Sports fixtures
You can envisage what this may look like for your school by taking a peek at Trinity Schools Calendar. We’ve found this considerably reduces the time it takes to retrieve information. There is also the added benefit for your school administrators- who would ultimately spend less time answering simple telephone queries that can be answered through the school website.
Another powerful option entailing from using our interactive calendar module is the ability for users to download files, for instance (.ical) if they use an iPad or iPhone, to import into their preferred calendar app. This enables them to integrate school information into a wider family life plan so key events happening with your school are well known and not missed!
It is also possible for this calendar to responsively render to screen sizes big and small, as when you’re trying to find out information on a mobile phone- this process should be as smooth as possible to avoid frustration from unnecessary finger pinching and zooming. This is something our skilled web developers love creating!
An ‘old school’ method in getting this information across is in .pdf form- providing the option to print out and stick on the fridge door! Although this way forfeits the option to provide personalised results, as the interactive calendar shows, and is tricky to account for slight date changes over the school year. To save yourself a headache it would be best to keep the .pdf calendar as a standard template with previously organised set dates- as Holmewood House nicely demonstrates.
The key thing to make sure you are doing is providing a variety of options for the end user; ensuring information is easily accessible across different mediums and platforms. It’s little things like this which makes life that bit easier for busy parents, and more importantly, keeps them engaged with the wider goings on at your school!
