The Flinnt Blog : Ideas for Users

5 reasons a CBSE school badly need a communication app!

I have been an educator in a CBSE school since 4 years and that shows that we are made for each other, I love to be a part of a CBSE school because it has an immense potential to develop oneself in all ways i. e. physically, mentally, personality, communication skills etc.

Working as an Incharge of Sarhad school (a Pune based school with the 1000+ students) I have learnt a lot about CBSE boards. Some of the things that have come to symbolise us as a CBSE school are as follows:

1) Continuous Assessment:

With the implementation of CCE (Continuous and Comprehensive evaluation) in 2010-2011, CBSE has made it compulsory to evaluate the child’s growth and development on a continuous basis rather than as a snapshot. Therefore the need of the hour is a communication app to convey the student’s progress on a continuous basis.

2) Formative Assessment:

An ongoing assessment on a regular interval to provide feedback that will improve the quality of students learning is called formative assessment. The regular and continuous feedback to each & every child in the limited time in school is not possible. An online platform could help the teacher connect with the learners after school and on the platform each learner can express their opinion and the teacher can also give detailed feedback. Hence the teachers need the online platform to communicate the feedback to their students and parents.

3) Evaluation Tools:

Classwork/ homework, assignments, projects, activities etc.. are some of the tools to evaluate a child’s scholastic as well as co-scholastic domains. A platform where teachers can provide home work, projects and also share worksheets with the students as well as their parents will resolve the issues that crop up because of a student being absent or because of some misunderstanding about the project.

4) Sharing resources:

Every school needs to share its resources like sample papers, worksheets, homework etc and it should be easily retrievable when preparing for the exam. A cloud based platform is the only option where all the resources can be preserved for the long time and can be searched and retrieved when required.

5) Making announcement:

“Schools will be closed due to heavy rains”, “Buses will be late by an hour”, “Tomorrow will be a stayback for some classes” are some of the regular announcements by schools. These announcement usually confirmed at the last moment, need to be communicated instantly. Such instant communications ask for an app which also provide an acknowledgement or read receipt so that the institution can be confident that the message has been received by the learners and the parents.

With these 5 reasons in mind we decided to go with Flinnt, an instant communication and sharing platform designed for Educational Institutions:

Though a CBSE school has all the above reasons to use the app but it takes time for external stakeholders to accustomed to change and quit the old routine so we started using Flinnt in following manner:

Giving homeworks: We began with posting homework through the app, specially for grade 1 to 10. This solved other problems of informing parents about the homework on a daily basis. Students especially from the lower grades usually forgot to share their homework with their parents, but with the Flinnt, the homework started going directly to the parents.

Making announcement to our parents: To our amazement, parents adopted the app enthusiastically and started commenting and liking on the posts of homework. This encouraged us to move to the next step and we started making announcements on the app. But these announcement are only for grade 9^th & 10th .

Sharing resources: Sharing resources specially with students in the higher grades is easy as the students are already using tablets and other mobile internet access devices. Resources like sample papers & worksheets are easy to access at home at their convenience and to use it to revise at the time of exam.

And next year onwards we look forward to using to gather feedback and as a tool for formative assessment.