It can be a struggle for parents to juggle their kids’ school events, games and conferences and it’s becoming increasingly common for parents to use web services to manage family calendars. But schools still remain stubbornly disconnected from parents online. While more and more schools are turning to the web as a platform, less than 5% of schools, both public and private, are offering parents internet school calendars. School Calenders Now, an initiative devoted to helping schools share their internet calendars with parents, is a partnership between Intand, which helps schools manage their calenders online, and Cozi, an online family calendar, scheduling service and social network. The initiative is billed as a way to help schools find a budget-friendly and easy way to make Internet school calendars available to parents. We previously reviewed Cozi here.
Through Intand, schools can publish their basic annual Internet school calendar at no cost. These calendars can also be synced up to calendar and scheduling programs used by consumers, including the Cozi’s Family Calendar, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and Apple’s iCal, giving parents automatic access to updates in a school’s calendar when schedules change.
School Calendars Now is embarking on a marketing campaign to let parents vote (on their site) to have their school’s official Internet calendar made available and can also notify other parents via e-mail to participate. School Calendars Now will tally the votes for each school and make requests to schools on behalf of all parents. The initiative seems like a good way to encourage schools to connect more efficiently with parents via technology (and to address an under-served market for Cozi and Intand).
Other competitors to Cozi include CalendarFly and MyFamily.com.
I deal with a lot of schools and many of them are reluctant to have activities online for security reasons (don’t want predators knowing kids’ schedules etc). As efficiency trumps this it’ll slowly change, but they evolve even more cautiously than banks.
I don’t blame them with parents suing the schools for everything bad happening in the school premises http://www.cnn....sexual.assault/
my comment got eaten, sorry if it double posts: School are reluctant to publish anything online that has to do with kids’ daily schedules & until efficency overcomes this fear they’ll continue to adopt online even more cautiously than banks.
No.
This service may want to look into ways of lowering the barrier to entry, possibly by doing low-tech things like having a fax number that schools can fax details to and a human enters the data in the school’s calendar (for a fee, of course).
I really see spaces like this being a great market to target, but for a lot of places like this, the barriers are just too high.
Why is it so difficult to keep a paper calendar magneted to the fridge? This worked flawlessly throughout my childhood.
I think the ability for parents to combine calendars in today’s fast pace child focused world is something schools need to look into. Sure, growing up I had a school calendar and a baseball practice calendar. 3rd graders at my school have the following:
School calendar
Violin calendar
basketball calendar
tennis calendar
after school activities calendar
add to that two parents working and the need for a calendar system whether something like this or just straight up Gcal becomes essential.
The new Chinese desktop app is tremendous!
I hear it’s going to get a billion users in no time!
Schools are SO far behind in leveraging the internet, but then again, funding for them keeps getting cut, so no wonder.
That said, our kids’ schools all have lesson plans posted online and most teachers post grades for each assignment, which is awesome for us parents, probably horrible for the kids. I know I would have hated it.
funding has nothing to do with it.
My kids’ schools use Google Calendar. One uses Vertical Response and the other uses Constant Contact for their emails. And one of them is also tweeting reminders of events. Easy and Cheap…
Most schools have to go through a school district of school system you seem to be not mentioning that.
We have been using spongecell for a couple of years. I’m not enamoured of the limited display.
I honestly don’t like the amazing number of vertical applicaiton vendors. For instance we use Moodle though teh rest of the district uses Blackboard.
My high school uses google calender for sports and music practices…it’s nice, but not great: when you just want to see orchestra rwhersals, they get really bogged down in all the other activites.
I also got a good laugh when my school system made a twitter account to provide updates on swine flu.
I have 2 daughters and share the concern. 10 years back how many of us would have agreed to PUT our credit card informations online.
I am sure with time as we get more comfortable and the system gets more secured we will eventually see schools opening to these ideas.
Just recently our district upgraded the webpage, and while they had a web calender for sporting events, more stuff is upfront and included now, included school events on video (though only wmv).
the great thing about it was that they just had a built in calender with the school software (a php script I assume), and when they upgraded, they had much more.
Im surprised more schools don’t just use a script for the job
I hate paper & welcome more stuff online. What’s wrong with parents having a password? Absolutely nothing! Have you seen how much paper comes home? Yeah, sometimes it’s nice to have something to hold in hand to read while you’re rocking the baby to sleep, but paper ends up on the floor. I vote digital!!!!
Geesh, even email it!
Bring on the digital world!!!
This idea about 5 years old. If a school is in this state the state should probably take them over. Time to catch up people. Blackboard, Angel Leanring, eChalk, Desire to Learn, even Moodle. Look into them.
I started ParentOrganizer to get rid of the communication mess of backpack papers and multiple emails. Calendars are great but are just one piece of the communication puzzle. We have sent more than 20 million personalized and aggregated emails since 2001 with a corresponding web portal. We provide a complete communication system for schools and PTAs to communicate to parents to really become paperless. We are launching a major upgrade in a few months. We have saved tons of paper, time, and money for our customers. Check us out at http://www.parentorganizer.com. The site is our old site but gives you an idea what we do.
Some of the reasons behind schools are reluctant to go online are, they don’t want to disclose the activities of the schools as well as details of the students, because of the security reasons and also the funding for the software also maybe a problem
You can also use the Schedules feature from http://www.Gtdagenda.com to keep your school schedule. A mobile version of the schedules is available too.
calendAr not calendEr!
Our school district already has an online calendar. It’s not very easy to use, but it’s there. You can export individual events in iCal format. Maybe that’s done on purpose so you only grab the events you need?
Well. I am trying to get something off the ground for parents using group-office, an open source application, that would have shared calendars, tasks, address book, file sharing and notes, based upon micro-groups per say. I would love some help if anyone out the wants to shoot me an email. On the website I am already offering free online calendar for parents, focusing on two household situation primararily, but not exclusively. Don’t steal my idea@@@
I think security will remain an issue in most online systems. So having a combination of what events to post online and what events to email directly to parents might be good to balance off not publishing too much online. The idea of having passwords and username to a website to view the calendar isn’t bad, but it just takes a tremendous amount of administration.
We understand the issue of security. Our system including forms, calendar, web portal, and emails is private and secure. Parents only get the information they want and ask for. They get to personalize by grade, teacher, group, etc. I don’t mean to sound like a pitch but our service is so relevant to the discussion.
Wow! This is off like a rocket! We have seen a huge amount of demand from parents voting to get their schools yearly calendar published. I wanted to hop on the boards quickly to answer some of the questions raised here:
1. antje wilsch – Security is a large concern at Intand. We take it very seriously. Yearly calendar data is already available at most (if not all) school websites. We are just helping to digitize it so any parent or student can subscribe to it in their digital calendars, be that Cozi, Outlook, iCal or Google Calendars. Practically, this helps a family keep up to speed when a snow day pushes back the last day of school. It will automatically update in your digital calendar, keeping your calendar current with information coming directly from the school.
2. Joe Bauers – So did my mom! We had the calendar taped to the inside of the cupboard where the glasses where. It’s not difficult to keep a paper calendar on your fridge. It’s extremely difficult for that paper calendar to update itself when a date changes. If you live and breathe by your digital calendar, like I do, then its nice to have it automatically update when dates change. (ps. Tandem basic provides an easy way to print out the yearly calendar in PDF, so you can keep it on the fridge. Its the best of both worlds!)
3. Jeff Utecht – AGREED! Further, trying having a 3rd, 7th and 12 grader… all at separate schools. The need for digital calendar feeds becomes exponential.
4. NM – Bring on digital is right! From a sustainable standpoint, digital calendars save paper. Paper purchased with tax payer money.
5. M A Dhavan – Funding for a FREE product is easy! Also, the analysis on the paid versions of Tandem is staggering. More room rentals, drastic reductions in paper, phone calls… not to mention a de-stressed staff knowing that ALL of their facilities are scheduled in a conflict free calendar.
Hope these answer up some questions.
Personally, it means a great deal to be featured alongside Schoolcal.org and Cozi on Techcrunch. Everyone here at Intand is extremely passionate about helping school districts use Tandem to manage their district, run their schools and engage with their community.
If you have any more questions, give us a ring!
Bryan Otis
President / Co-Founder at Intand