Return to school: How epraise can help part 2

Blog

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

Want to find out more?

Book a demo

Share on social media

Recent updates - November 2024

We've been working on our prize draws functionality, with a new draw type and lots of user experience improvements throughout. We've also added several smaller updates including improvements to our graphs and charts.

Ben DunfordNovember 2024 - 4 minute read

Recent updates - September 2024

It's the back-to-school season in the Northern Hemisphere and the team has been working hard on some brand new functionality to help schools boost well-being and build positive relationships with students.

Ben DunfordSeptember 2024 - 4 minute read

Recent updates - April 2024

It's been a few months since our last update and we've been working on a number of exciting updates, including improvements to our report an incident or concern feature, as part of this year's student wellbeing focus. Read all about them in the latest updates blog.

Ben DunfordApril 2024 - 4 minute read

Effective Behaviour Management

What is effective behaviour management and what impact can it have in your school? Join Ben Dunford as he discusses some strategies you can use to improve behaviour in your classroom.

Ben DunfordJanuary 2024 - 5 minute read

Recent updates - November 2023

This month we launched our new student details page and completed our AWS migration. Read about these and several other updates in this month's updates blog.

Ben DunfordNovember 2023 - 3 minute read

Recent updates - October 2023

Read about the latest updates to the epraise platform, including big changes to our supporting technologies, our planned migration to AWS and several smaller incremental improvements.

Ben DunfordOctober 2023 - 3 minute read

We use cookies

Allow all cookies

Essential cookies only

Our cookie list

Our privacy policy