This is one move by the schools that won’t impress students in the city. A messaging solution company has developed a software for parents and teachers to keep in touch through personalised SMS accounts.
Designed to empower school authorities to communicate with parents and guardians anytime and anywhere, Mobile Mantra is offering connectivity with customised service, enabling the users to send SMS to multiple locations, set advance SMS reminders and details of students progress and notices such as fee payment dates, among others. Also, there is integration of multiple address books which store records of sent messages for future use.
‘‘If we find that a student is bunking class or is absent for more than a day, we will send a message to the parents instantly. Earlier, a written note was sent which would take two days to reach the parents,’’ said S.C. Baweja, Principal of Bal Bharati School, Pitampura. The school has just adopted the application.
Baweja said earlier this (mobile) service was being used only for sending messages when school buses were delayed and for regular mailers and programme sheets. But now, not only will the service cut down the load of paper work but is also a cost-effective method, as the communication overheads are reduced by almost 50 per cent.
The benefits to parents also include notifications on cellphone even when abroad and is aimed to build up their confidence in the school administration by allowing transparency. The messages are archived and can be sent to the new school where the student is going, to help that school understand the child’s psychology, his areas of interest, his behaviour etc. However, not all schools believe it to be essential.
Bharati Sharma, Principal of Amity International, said: ‘‘For a few urgent messages may be the service is helpful but there is the risk of cutting down face-to-face parent teacher interaction. As a means of communication it is great but not at the cost of replacing PTA meetings which are more inter-personal and give a better idea of a child’s development.’’
School counsellors, however, feel that the SMS service will be a good check-master on their students.
‘‘Nowadays, we notice that children lie to their parents and say they are going to school but are meeting at a friend’s place, who has working parents, to watch porn sites or meet with their girlfriends or boyfriends. This service could help us check this and also eliminate the child’s role in parent-teacher interaction,’’ said Rupa Murghai, counsellor at Naval Public School.
The primary motive to launch this service, said President/ CEO of Mobile Mantra, Naveen Varshneya, is to address the growing need for a smooth communication platform between the teachers and the parents.