Must-Have School Portal Features to Drive Community Engagement

Picture of By bojana.lazarevska
By bojana.lazarevska
Must-Have School Portal Features to Drive Community Engagement

A vibrant school community portal is an engaging destination for your parents, staff, and students. There are a range of features you should consider when you’re looking to purchase or upgrade your school’s portal.

A school portal needs to work seamlessly for your whole school community. Below, we’ve outlined some of the key Schoolbox features we believe make for a market-leading portal for K-12 schools.

Customisable and Intuitive

We know that for schools, it’s important to have software that complies with your branding and colours. That’s why Schoolbox is completely customisable, so you can theme your instance with your school’s brand and your own URL.

We also understand that users will be accessing the product on the go, which is why Schoolbox is available on all devices. Our modern and responsive interface is web-based, so anyone can use it anywhere, anytime.

User-Friendly Design

It’s easy to create beautiful pages in Schoolbox. Our drag-and-drop functionality provides a user-friendly touch. Dashboards, landing pages and homepages can all be tailored and configured, allowing you to showcase beautiful content with engaging layouts.

Each school is different. Schoolbox is flexible enough to allow you to switch on what you need and switch off what you don’t.

Market-Leading Integrations and Access to Third-party Services

Integrations with leading student information systems (SISs) ensures schools have access to all the key information they need. Information is pulled straight from your SIS and made visible in Schoolbox, giving staff and parents visibility over student information.

Schoolbox also provides single sign-on (SSO) access to third-party services and integrates with dozens of other school systems and vendors to streamline your school day. You can safely embed approved content or media from other sources right within your class pages to enrich the learning and engagement of your students.

Easy Communication and Collaboration

Rich, creative tools and homepages provide plenty of interactive spaces where students, staff and parents can communicate and collaborate. These include:

  • Our news system, which allows users to schedule and publish school, class or group news quickly and easily. Keep your community up-to-date!
  • Real-time notifications and notices (a communication game-changer!) that keep everyone informed with our instant in-app, email and mobile notifications.
  • Social stream components to engage users in a format that they are familiar using, and encourage “live” and social communication.
  • Our discussion forums, which ensure everyone has a voice.
  • The Fixtures system that allows you to push relevant information to team members and their parents about where and when they are involved in an extra-curricular activity. The system is fully integrated into the calendar, team homepages and notification system.
  • A mobile app with push notifications to parents, teachers and students.

Additionally, we have support for blogs, online chats, Wikis, groups, email and newsletter digests, and much more!

Personalised Content

Personalisation is easy in Schoolbox! Our parent, student and staff portal, and content management system (CMS) ensures that users in different roles get different experiences within the instance. Our CMS allows you to tailor access to content to different audiences, so users see only what is relevant to them.

Instant Feedback

With enhanced feedback abilities, teachers can assess a student’s work and quickly return it. Along with a grade and comments, teachers have the ability to annotate the student’s original document, add images or files, and even record audio feedback.

Everything, All in One Place

Schoolbox centralises your information and makes it easy for educators to get back to what matters most. There are plenty of features to get excited about, including:

  • A personal cloud file storage; a place to call your own and store files online.
  • A powerful calendar with so many features, it will completely transform your school. iCalendar enables you to subscribe to existing Microsoft Exchange and Google calendars, and consume live iCal export feeds to your devices.
  • A resource booking system to ensure your next booking is a breeze.
  • Integrated timetables for students, parents and teachers, so you can keep up-to-date with what’s happening at your school.
  • Online surveys and forms, which can start collecting responses right away.
  • A parent directory that can allow parents to search and locate the details and information of other parents.
  • The ability to mark attendance if you’re a Synergetic or TASS school.

There’s plenty more to get excited about. The best way to find out how we can provide your school with the best portal solution is to get in touch with us today. Speak to you soon!