Mobile Apps: The Power of Connecting Local School Districts

How Info Grove Connected School District 35 in Langley, BC

As the world becomes more and more digitized many school districts have begun utilizing mobile apps to connect with parents, teachers, and students. This became even more important when the COVID-19 pandemic forced students to learn from home. 

To help school districts develop their apps many turned to us because our mobile apps are simple to use, easy to customize, improve community engagement, and can be built in a matter of weeks. Our process is cost-effective and affordable for most school districts.

A really good example of a recent project was for School District 35 (SD35) in Langley, which is 45 kilometres southeast of Vancouver. The school district approached us in June 2019 asking us to develop a mobile app for them that could also include content foreach individual school in the district. 

To give you an idea of the challenge we faced, we needed to develop an app that could meet the needs of more than 23,000 students and over 3,000 teachers, support staff, and administrators. The app would also need to be used for over 40 schools providing international baccalaureate programs, French immersion, and fundamental and alternative programs.

With this in mind, our team got to work immediately as we needed to work on the integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory. Though it was a special request, it was a high-priority feature. With this integration in mind, we had the app ready to launch in time for the school year that started in September. 

The primary goal of the mobile app, which you can download on the Apple Store or Google Play, was to improve community engagement and communication between the district/schools and students, staff, and administration. It also needed to be easy to use and be designed in a way that it could be customized for each school. 

With this type of flexibility, each school can add its own content using over 35 different modules to customize it for each of their individual needs. For example, nearly every school has a calendar of events, however, some schools also opted to integrate their social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, while others did not. 

The flexibility offered by Info Grove’s content management system (CMS)  makes it easy for schools to change the content whenever they want simply by adding or removing different modules. It also helps staff and students communicate with each other easily. 

We also provided the school district with hands-on training and continue to offer support if needed, however, most questions can be answered through the CMS’s documentation page since we’ve designed it to be very user-friendly and non-technical.

Connection and community support are key in education. Contact us today to find out how your school district can benefit from a mobile app.

About the author: Karim Mansour is an Inside Sales Representative at 14 Oranges, the creators of the Info Grove platform.