Why Does Your School Need a School Management System?
Education has advanced at such a rapid pace that what was once effortlessly documented on paper is now a challenge. Evolving technology has propelled us to look for less-complicated, paperless methods for carrying out tasks, and education isn't different.
Schools today experience several challenges in conducting consistent functioning. Result release, database administration, fee collecting, timetable management, employee and student attendance records, and other associated duties all require manual labor that demands significant time, effort, and resources.
School administration manages a school while integrating campuses and departments to complete the purpose. It will be simple to accomplish their objectives if the educational system is transformed using high-tech solutions to enhance administrative and academic operations. There is a growing need to upgrade the public educational system with cloud, mobile, and digital technologies to run the institution seamlessly.
Why a school management system is needed? It is a well-equipped and centralized platform that enables the teacher, students, and other staff members to communicate easily and carry out essential school duties. It also enables them to streamline academic tasks and manage their workflow. The Tech Revolution and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic boosted the popularity of educational software and apps.
Every school administration is seeking dependable, secure, and effective educational software to reduce labor and revamp their operations. However, you must clearly outline your goals and purposes to choose the best software for your school.
Why a School Management System is Needed?
Automating school operations and strengthening teaching and learning techniques is the main goal of a school system. For example, managing attendance and fee payments, storing and retrieving academic documents, and monitoring student progress are all possible with the use of a school management software/app. It is the ideal medium for having regular conversations with parents, teachers, and students. Thus, an encouraging learning environment is promoted through school management software. Educators can reward and encourage all their students fairly and on time. Since it automatically creates progress reports, mark sheets, etc., it also decreases human mistakes.
Challenges Faced By The Schools And Their Most Apt Solutions
Here is a detailed analysis of the various challenges faced by schools. Explore why a school management system is needed and how Teachmint- the ultimate school management software, provides the most viable solution for each of these challenges.
CHALLENGE: Communication Gap
One of the major challenges that many institutions are dealing with is a communication gap between teachers, students, and parents. The effective academic achievement of students relies on efficient communication, but many institutions fail to provide timely interaction between teachers, students, and parents.
There appears to be no platform for efficient communication among students, administrators, employees, and teachers. Furthermore, an increase in student disciplinary issues occurs due to a significant communication gap between students and teachers.
SOLUTION: Communication Module
Teachmint’s communication module answers school administrators’ need to contact teachers, parents, and students. It makes effective communication possible with just a few clicks. The feature of this module includes the following:
- Push notifications to make it simple for administrators to communicate information to both students and teachers. They can also view the time frame of the conversations. The administrators will see a dashboard with a list of the messages that have been sent thus far.
- They can quickly communicate important information to parents. As a result, parents are made aware of the activities that are taking place on the school's campus.
- Administrators can send messages with just a few clicks. The message structure is straightforward and calls for information like the message's title and body. Administrators can upload any necessary files and fill in the necessary information. Files in PNG, JPEG, MP3, or MP4 formats can be uploaded.
- The communication module allows effective decision-making at higher levels by increasing transparency and ensuring a seamless exchange of information.
- Teachmint makes it easier for teachers and administrators to share information. The school management system becomes more efficient when they are well-linked.
CHALLENGE: Attendance Management
Maintaining attendance conventionally is usually a challenging task. Preserving proper attendance records on paper necessitates a great deal of effort. Additionally, teachers are usually confused by the large volume of attendance.
In the conventional attendance system, activities such as categorizing students primarily on attendance, accessing a specific student's attendance records, and so on are time-consuming. The main issue in educational institutions is and has always been absenteeism. Students commonly "bunk" classrooms, and it becomes challenging to identify such absences when a friend is given the responsibility of acting as a proxy to them during the roll call.
SOLUTION: Attendance Module
An essential component that illustrates the significance of the software for school management is an attendance management system. It makes it possible for you to efficiently prepare reports using various matrices. In the event that a student is absent from school, you could send alerts to the parents. The software also stores attendance records online in the cloud so that teachers can have access to them at any time. The salient features of the Teachmint attendance module include the following:
- Attendance recording becomes quite prompt. To analyze staff and student attendance, graphs and charts are available. Viewing the attendance history for a specific day, week, month, or year becomes very simple.
- The method of managing attendance stops staff time theft by monitoring employees' working hours, login times, departures, breaks, and vacation time.
- This module also addresses online student attendance as well as absent or half-day leave scheduling.
- The mistakes will eventually decrease to zero with little to no human participation in attendance computation. Attendance can be readily changed in the event of an error, and statistics will be automatically improvised based on new data.
- Because student attendance will be readily accessible to all stakeholders, including students, class teachers, subject teachers, parents, administrators, and super administrators, everyone will be kept up-to-date on the student's attendance, making them all accountable for it in their own particular way.
CHALLENGE: Exam Management
Organizing an exam is a task that necessitates a plethora of documentation and rigorous organization. Creating question papers, protecting them from getting leaked, and reprinting them if there is an error, are only a few of the disadvantages of the traditional exam format.
Both teachers and administration find the time-consuming and tedious paperwork to be frustrating. Furthermore, it is not just about evaluating the answer sheets but also about keeping the documentation secure for an extended period of time. These types of challenges are not only unproductive in terms of time, but the immense paperwork is also negative for the environment.
SOLUTION: Exam Module
Exam management software would benefit teachers in planning examinations more efficiently and productively. Starting from the planning stage to the result management, an exam management system handles everything. The basic features of this module include the following:
- With the use of exam management software, the complete academic year can be planned effectively. Students will know what to prepare for the full year by this method. Since the timetable will be planned out in advance, you can prepare for additional approaches to enhance the teaching and learning outputs. They also include curriculum revisions and remedial classes for students who find a certain subject challenging.
- Generating report cards is one of the most popular elements of Teachmint's exam module since it relieves the teachers of the most time-consuming task of creating report cards. The teachers may fill up the marks and generate the report cards in a matter of minutes using this platform. Following that, they may swiftly and conveniently download the cards for each student or for all the students at once.
- With the help of the exam management module, the institution can design the exam format more effortlessly. They can modify the exam format, the highest score, the subjects, and much more here. They may also include all study breaks or vacation days.
- There are various options for teachers to publish or add questions. To construct tests, they can use the question bank, type the questions, or upload PDF files. With Teachmint, teachers can make the exam-taking process simpler.
CHALLENGE: Transportation
The days of parents looking for schools close to where they resided are long gone. Most educational institutions offer pick-up and drop-off services employing their network of school and college buses. These buses take up students, non-teaching staff, and school personnel. The primary emphasis is on student and staff safety. Technology has made it feasible to execute and monitor strategic plans, which improves safety.
SOLUTION: Transport Module
A significant size of manual work is minimized, and the management of the school gets quick feedback on a number of metrics with an ideal transport module. Procuring transport reports would have needed days of typical manual administrative operations. The finest transportation management system is one that integrates with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for the school. The characteristic features of the transport module include the following:
- The school transportation program keeps track of information, including vehicle identification numbers and the designated driver.
- The ability to view the transportation fee independently from the other school fees allows the administration of the school to easily update the transportation fee and notify all parents of it. When payment history and payment dues alerts are provided, the administration office of the institution runs more efficiently.
- Once the location of the school has been established, the transport management system will use relative geolocation to mark out each stop. Because of the geolocation-based stops, the system can properly compute the distance between the stop and the school.
- There is essentially no actual documentation involved when it comes to transport management when using a transport management system because all the tracking, calculating, record-keeping, and other related processes are done digitally.
- An extra dimension of a transport management system is real-time GPS tracking. Teachmint enables school administrators to track the location of a school bus. Parents will also be informed of the location and path taken by their children's school bus.
CHALLENGE: Admissions
Traditional methods of managing the admissions process have many drawbacks, including losing out on crucial inquiries and a lack of communication between staff and applicants. Universities and colleges have been having trouble meeting their enrollment and admissions goals.
It will be easier for schools to handle information from inquiries and applications to admission and enrollment of people when processes and technology are well-aligned. Manual admission of students wastes significant time. Students stand in queues to make payments and perform other necessary tasks. It is a time-consuming procedure in addition to being tedious. However, a large number of institutions are now using an online application registration system. As a result, less paper is consumed, and students' registration actions are better controlled.
SOLUTION: Admission Module
The admissions process is made more efficient with admission management software. Educational institutions can handle student admission and enrollment processes online with admission management software. Parents and children do not have to spend hours waiting in line to be admitted to the institution. The admission management system allows parents and students to submit an online request for information about school admissions. Teachmint simplifies the admissions process for schools, institutions, and parents. The distinct features of the admission module include the following:
- Teachmint makes it simple for educational institutions to gather and manage student information. Administrators are no longer required to manually collect each student's data. The admission management software allows them to streamline the data collection procedure.
- Admission management software allows administrators to gather relevant documentation from students. The dashboard allows students to upload their data.
- Merit lists can be created by educational institutions to expedite the admissions process and can include the best performers in the institutions.
- Keep your admissions process free of paperwork. Software for managing admissions streamlines paperwork and encourages eco-friendly admission procedures.
- Teachmint uses calls to make the process of following up with prospective candidates easier. A follow-up call can be scheduled by educational institutions with a single click. They can also directly add the accepted students to the directory of students.
- It's critical to deliver the appropriate information at the appropriate moment. To make the admissions process simpler, you can use Teachmint to transfer or allocate inquiries to individual counselors or take care of them yourself.
CHALLENGE: Handling Fees
Collecting payments from all students within the deadline is a crucial responsibility for institutions. They may encounter numerous difficulties during this process. Moreover, manually entering data exposes you to the possibility of errors and omissions. Staff at the school have a difficult time handling the traditional approach of collecting payments and maintaining entries. They could occasionally feel uninterested in carrying out unnecessary duties. To pay the fees on time, the guardians occasionally miss important work-hour shifts, or the students lose important classes. Another step that has taken both parties many hours of grief is the procedure of keeping the receipt safe. Such time-consuming tasks can be completed instantly. Parents may easily make payments online and keep a record of their children's past payment histories with the help of the right software on hand.
SOLUTION: Fees Module
Institutions can use a fee management system to digitize the fee payment process. Additionally, the system provides school administration with a number of benefits. Administrators and other members of the faculty can quickly monitor the progress of the money collected. The program is able to provide fee receipts and reports in addition to handling the fee payments. All sizes of colleges and universities can be supported by the system. The basic features of the admission module are the following:
- Numerous institutions provide students with financial aid and other advantages. They might also provide discounts for early admissions. Institutes can quickly and easily assign fee categories with the help of the fee management module. With Teachmint, you can manage several charge types and streamline the fee collection procedure.
- Institutes can save time and work by using online fee collecting. Additionally, parents find it more comfortable to pay tuition without worrying about sending their children to school or college.
- In the manual fee-collecting procedure, keeping track of who is paying what installment becomes challenging. A fee management system makes it simple for schools to keep track of the various payments made by both parents and students.
- It is essential for every institute and parent to get automated reminders regarding fee payments and collection. In certain circumstances, using a system for notifications and reminders is useful. Parents and children will be informed about the upcoming fee payment cycle.
- The program is easily navigable so that the school administration can see how it streamlines its tasks. The purpose of the fee management software is to speed up the process of school accountants while offering an unrivaled fee collection solution.
CHALLENGE: Bulk Data
Schools regularly handle large amounts of student data. Every day, teachers and administrators must manage hundreds of student records. Dealing with bulk data usually leads to confusion, which may have an impact on all of those schools' academic standards. It is not only extremely wasteful but also impractical to save all of the student information on paper. Due to extensive enrollment processes, personnel hiring procedures, and other organizational operations, the records are continuously growing. Therefore, keeping track of everything and protecting it from inquisitive eyes is a difficult undertaking in and of itself. Additionally, documents that have been damaged by natural catastrophes or other issues cannot be recovered.
SOLUTION: School ERP
The technique of efficient resource management begins when the administration analyzes their schools to determine what resources their students and teachers require and concludes when they make those resources available. The features of resource management include the following:
- The School Library Management System enables you to add several copies of a single book, allowing you to issue the same book simultaneously to multiple students based on the stock level in the library.
- Depending on the number of rooms available, hostel accommodations may be offered to students. Custom fields can be added to hostel details to record any additional data that the institution may desire.
- The institute needs to provide items (such as stationery, uniforms, and books) to students and/or faculty members. The administrator can design and manage these items.
CHALLENGE: Study Material
Students often fail to pay close attention to classroom lectures and thus find it difficult to take flawless notes. Often teachers have to intervene and provide students with well-structured notes to boost their comprehension of the concepts. The process of formulating and sharing specific notes or other study material can be time-consuming for teachers.
SOLUTION: Study Material Module
Teachers can give students the information they need to improve note-taking by giving them the necessary data. By providing them with resources related to their area of interest, you can assist them. Students will be able to understand issues throughout when they have access to a wide range of resources. Additionally, it can help individuals become interested in those topics and perhaps motivate them to conduct their own research. The features of the study material module include the following:
- Whenever and wherever they choose, teachers can readily share the notes. Students gain from the functionality as a consequence of having availability to the posted notes anytime they need it. Additionally, the students are notified anytime their teacher uploads new materials.
- With the help of this function, teachers may easily post class-related content that students can download and read whenever they choose. As a result, the teacher's schedule is spared to interact with the class and actively involve the students in the learning process in addition to imparting knowledge. The teacher can also include links to YouTube videos that serve as supplemental reading material for students who are eager to learn more about the topic.
- Teachers can share pictures, PDFs, Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets, movies (under 150MB), and even YouTube video links. In order to provide students with a three-dimensional learning experience outside of the classroom, teachers are now able to provide them with a variety of multimedia learning tools.
- The digital whiteboard can be used by teachers as a teaching tool, with notes, mnemonic devices, and small diagrams being written on it as a visual help. The teacher can retain the points made on the digital whiteboard as study material so that they can be accessed later if they believe they should be written down.
Conclusion
The industry for school administration software has come up with several solutions to ease operations. However, the demand for a single software that serves as a one-stop continues to increase. To ease it all, Teachmint stepped forward and introduced its innovative Integrated School Platform- a school management system that manages colleges, schools, and other educational institution requirements effectively. It helps schools lighten their administrative burden. It presents a unique combination of a Learning Management System + School ERP + Digital Content. With Teachmint, schools today are capable of managing all of their tasks in one location as a consequence– improving operational efficiency.