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Sangha Meetings and Calendars Webinar

Added Nov 29, 2017 •

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Learn how to use Sangha's parent-teacher meetings and actionable calendars features. We'll go over aspects including creating a calendar event, setting a meeting, and more. Learn how these features work from both a parent/staff point of view and from the parent's viewpoint.

Show Transcript

Hello everyone, my name is Matt Woods with Edlio and I just want to thank you all for joining us today on our quick tour of Sangha, our new parent app that we've recently acquired. I have a couple different things we're going to go through today, but first of all just kind of want to introduce you to the basics of Sangha, or Sangha, however you want to pronounce it. First and foremost, we've recently acquired this company within Edlio's family, we're folding them into our platform. And the name Sangha itself actually means community in Sanskrit. So that's exactly what it's for. It's for your community, it's for your families at your schools or districts. The system is really really nice in that it's going to actually tie into your current SIS system or student database. And so it's going to have all of the parent's information right from the get-go. And it's not only a parent communication tool, but is also what we call actionable calendar items, meaning that parents are actually going to see their individual child's calendar. Or if they have multiple children at the school or district, they're going to actually be able to see a combined calendar of all of their kids, which is really nice. This whole slide show I'm going to very quickly take you through is just a brief snapshot of Sangha and I'm actually going to get to a real live demonstration of it very quickly as well. So I'm going to very quickly take you through this. This is kind of a quick snapshot of what it looks like again. And one of the big things with Sangha, is we know that schools and districts tend to put out messages through multiple avenues. We really want to consolidate all of those communication channels that parents are receiving into one nice neat package. And we believe Sangha accomplishes that in a very neat, very easy to use system. And some big things with our user testing that we've heard from parents are about 85% of parents are dissatisfied with how schools or districts are communicating with them. Either they're getting too many messages to an extent that they basically don't listen to those messages anymore, or they're coming to a form of communication that the parent does not wish. With Sangha, the parent actually is determining how you're communicating with them. And you still put out a message through one centralized system, and that it goes to that parent if they want it through the Sangha app itself, if they want it through email, if they want it through text message or voicemail, so you don't have to do all these different things. It can do it for you in one centralized area. And then lastly, just a nice little package of what we're trying to accomplish. Administrators, teachers, and groups of people can communicate directly through Sangha, reaching parents how they wish to be communicated with. Most of you are going to be familiar already with the backend of the Edlio website platform, the content management system, CMS for short. I'm sure everyone's looks very very similar to this in some aspect, but the big thing you're going to notice on this is in this top right hand corner, you're going to see a little Sangha icon for schools or districts that have implemented Sangha. And this is actually going to allow you to do a, what we call, single sign-on from the website platform to the Sangha application itself. The nice thing is, you don't have to set up anymore usernames anymore passwords, anything like that. It's all going to be tied directly to the Edlio CMS that you're already utilizing. So let's go ahead, I've already opened up a couple of windows here. Let's go ahead and actually jump into the Sangha side of it. And I have two versions open right here, so we can kind of get an idea. For users that are going to be looking at a district implementation of Sangha, we have this version right here which looks very similar, the only difference between a single school version and a district version is you're actually going to have a drop down right here. Where if you're a district administrator, you could actually flip to individual schools within the district to actually create events or messages within that particular set of teachers or parents at that school. From the district standpoint, you'll be able to create district-wide announcements. So you'll be able to push additional announcements out to the entire district, then you can actually go and select the middle school and push announcements out to individual groups within the actual middle school that we're looking at. So you can kind of see right here we switched over to the other school. And we can actually see all the different calendar events set for this particular school, in different classes within this. So Sangha has a couple of different items that we can do to it. The one we're looking at right here is the calendar based version of this. And that's kind of what I was talking about when I said actionable calendar items. So it's something that a lot of people aren't familiar with because they don't see it very often because it's brand-new. Most calendars that schools or districts utilize, are what we call dumb calendars or quick remind events. They just, here's an event, here's the time, here's location, here's the description of said event, that's it. With our calendar events in Sangha, you can actually have actionable items attached to said event. So I think it's easiest shown than kind of me just talking about it, so I'm going to actually go and create a brand new calendar event on here. So if I click create new event, it's going to populate our calendar system. So the first one that I just mentioned was that quick remind which is just like any other kind of calendar system that you're currently using. Title of the event, description, if you want to attach any photos, PDFs, date, timed, if it is a timed. But the thing you will notice that's a little bit different is with Sangha, you can actually push these events to individual teachers' calendars. When teachers login to Sangha, they're actually only going to see their individual classroom that they're teaching, or classrooms, because they can have multiple obviously. We're again logged in as a webmaster so we can see everyone's classroom, kind of like when you log into the Edlio CMS if you're teacher you see a very small bit, if you're an administrator you tend to see a lot more. Same with Sangha, same concept, permissions based access. But that quick remind is just like Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, anything like that. And speaking of Microsoft and Google, Sangha is actually going to be able to tie into those calendaring systems. So if people still do like to create events, quick remind events through there, they can do that with Sangha. They're not going to be able to do the actionable items on this because frankly, those other systems aren't smart enough to handle the actual content that Sangha can do. So let's kind of jump into one of these actual items, you'll see we have two here. We have sign up events and parent-teacher meetings, because we can actually do parent-teacher conferences and allow them, allow the parents to select the best time and date for that parent-teacher meet. So I'm going to go actually do signup events first and let's kind of show that very quickly. So, again, welcome to Sangha. Here is a quick look. And I'll make a little attachment to this so just a little photo here, and we'll do a date of, for this Friday. And I'll go ahead and do a timed event as well just so we can see what that looks like. If you need to do a repeating event, you can definitely do that right through our system. You can have repeat weekly, multiple just days within a month, or different months. Days within a month. But we're not going to do repeating event for this one. And here is actually where we're going to just select my class because a lot of my other colleagues have already downloaded the Sangha app as well and I don't want to notify them about this event, I want it to be used particular to my class because I'm kind of doing this as an individual teacher would. Let me come down here and we say hey, we need to do an RSVP for this event. So we can do an RSVP deadline, so our event's on that first, we'll do a deadline for tomorrow, we can do event capacity, do as many people as you'd like, and you do number of guests per student. So if I had that, that's fine. I'm going to switch over to volunteer now. So we can do volunteering opportunities, you know, help with the fundraiser. Help with the fundraiser, nice thing is, hand out flyers. Nice thing is, you can add shifts to this event since parents time is very, very valuable. So we can come down here and go hey we'll just do hourlong shifts for parents to volunteer for, and we'll do one parent per shift. The system has some built-in logic to it, so when you start adding additional shifts, it's going to just replicate that first timed shift. So an hourlong shift with one sign up, it's going to do this until the end of our actual volunteering opportunity right here. So I'm just going to save that task. If we wanted to, we could create more than one volunteering task here. So if parents want to help hand out flyers or help fundraise, the other could do a car wash or something like that. You can have as many tasks as you'd like, volunteering task. You can also have people volunteer to bring items, so bring water, we'll do three for this. We'll save the task, you know, bring hotdogs. We'll do five for that, save item. Sangha also has the ability to actually do a digital release form for, parents actually fill out any type of digital documents that they need to fill out, if that's a field trip release form, photography to use the pictures of their child on the website, really any type of forms we can digitize for you and put in the Sangha app. So parents can actually digitally sign this so you don't have to actually send paper home with the student for them to have parents physically sign it and then bring it back. So it's going to cut down on your paper costs, it's also going to cut down on, you know, students literally just not handing papers to parents since this is coming directly to parents' hands. So we're just going to go over to payments now. Again, we can actually do payments right through these events themselves. So we have a couple different types of campaigns in our demo site here. Fixed fee field trips, so the amount is not going to change per student, it's the same for everyone. You can do fundraising or donations through here. And you can do ticketed items through here so we're just going to do a quick ticketed item on here so we can have something. $5, you can do a description if you'd like, and you can also have multiple accounts to actually deposit these funds into. We just have one for a demo purposes. We use a system called Stripe for the credit card processing part of this. Stripe does carry a fee of 2.19% plus $0.30 per transaction. The great thing about that is those transaction fees get moved to the parents, the school does not pay any of these fees, they get moved to the parents. So this $5 fee will have a transaction fee of $0.65 I believe. So it's going to be $5.65 total to the parent to pay. If you're feeling generous, you are more than welcome actually pay the cover fee with our optional section right here. You can even do a payment deadline, so we'll do a payment deadline as well for tomorrow since our event is on Friday. And if there are any generic questions that you kind of want to preempt parents for, you can put those right here. But if we're happy with everything we just did, we can literally just go publish to parents. And I have a little emulator going on right here, so I can see what this actually looks like in the app form. So this is just an iPod touch I've hooked up here. And I've downloaded the Sangha app and here's kind of what it looks like coming through the parents, like a notification. So as a parent, I could literally tap that notification, it's going to pull me into the app, into the actual event that we just created. So you can see, welcome to Sangha, December 1st, the time, the location. But here's a quick look is going to be the body of our event itself, you can be as long as you want here, it can be as long as you want. Jane driver is actually the organizer of the event, or the person that I'm actually logged in as. And then here are these, a couple of different items we've created, so the first one is going to be this RSVP. So as a parent, I can tap on this and say I do actually want to go and attend this event. So I would say, both me and my wife are going to attend this event, so two parents, click check. I have just now RSVP'ed in real-time, telling the organizer of this event that me and my wife will be attending. You know, maybe our son is singing in a choir or something like that, are going to be attending this event. So the organizer can keep an accurate headcount. If there there is a max capacity of RSVPs, once you hit that max capacity, it will not allow anyone else to RSVP because you hit that max capacity. So if we need to volunteer for said event, I can click on that next box and go, hey as a parent, the earliest time of the day works best for me so I'm going to go ahead and just sign up for that 8:30 volunteer opportunity right there. Nice thing is, if something does come up and I need to cancel that, it's as simple as just tapping that again and you're freeing that spot back up. Because when it's green for me that means it's actually greyed out for everyone else that is in this particular group that sees the same opportunities here. So no one else could use that same time as me. Bringing items, very similar to signing up. Literally just tap which one you want to do. I want to bring water and I also want to do hot dogs, want to do both. And you'll notice those initials AD right next to it, those are actually the initials of my my student, my son Antonio Brown in our demo purposes here. Then next one is going to be the digital form here, so it's now going to allow us to select the student because the system is smart enough to know if you have more than one child at the school or district. So I can go and actually say Antonio Brown is one of my children and James Harrison. So I'll just go ahead and select Antonio here and it populates a digital electronic consent form, essentially saying this is the same as pen and paper, it's just a digital version. If I click agree in the bottom right corner. Here is going to be the actual form that was populated in the Sangha system. So I can come down here and you'll see, you'll notice that I actually did populate Antonio Brown's name. I've already had some other uses for a couple other times too, you might see some gibberish. But I can literally just punch my name right in here, come back here, sorry punch my name here. Done, put in my cell phone number here, put in my email address, and I can really go submit, and I just sent this form back again to the organizer of this event. And the nice thing is, the organizer of this event can actually export all of these selections we're doing into like an excel spreadsheet and actually keep a hard copy so they can see who's paid for what, who's signed up, who hasn't on this. And I'll show you another way that they can also. So this is actually essentially not a bad time to talk about this. This is kind of what the app looks like when we first launch into it, this is actually a calendar view of all of my children's calendars. You'll see in the top right corner there's a little face that says all, if I click that, I can actually see both of my kids there. So I can either select all or select an individual student if I only want to see one of my child's calendars. But for our purposes we'll select all so we can see everyone's. And if I pull up from the bottom here, it's actually going to show me those individual events about what's going on that day. We're on the 28th so we want to go back one, we don't want to do the 29th, oh no the 30th, that's where I created that welcome Sangha. So here's that event that we were just working on, the last part is going to be the payment itself. So here's the payable part of this. $5 flat fee, quantity is one for that one ticket. $0.65, $5.65 to the parent. You come down here and start punching in your your credit card, and click pay with card, and now you've actually just saved that credit card and paid for that item all within a single calendar event on the Sangha app. And if maybe the quantity is wrong, you wanted to actually do two for you and your wife, you can just adjust it and the system is actually going to adjust everything accordingly. You'll see it's now $10.83 as opposed to $5.65. Very quick, very easy to actually do all these adjustments right within the app. But you might say, what if I don't have the app, the app is available on both iOS and Android, but there's other ways to actually interact with this. First is going to be email, if you don't have the app, the system's going to know know you don't have the app, you're going to get an emailed version of this. So everything you saw us do right through the app, you're going to be able to do on your email. And again, the system is going to know as soon as you fill out RSVP, volunteer, sign the release forms make payments, it's going to know this, but there's also a way to do it actually even through the public-facing side of your website. So this is actually just one of our demo websites here, Hamilton Elementary, the fighting avocados. And right here is actually going to be the public facing version of the Sangha calendar. So as a parent I can actually come in here and go hey, I need to actually do something for an event. And these events are all going to be the actual like schoolwide or district-wide events. The individual teacher calendars are not going to populate on here because obviously not everyone's going to need to see individual teacher calendars. Those are going to be able to be placed on individual teacher pages if those teachers wish, or they can them private so no one has access to them unless they're able to actually access Sangha in some fashion. But since this is a public version of it, maybe the beach trip is something like an actionable item. So I'm just going to click on this beach trip. And this is an actionable item so I need to actually sign up for this event, this beach trip, so I can click sign up. The system is going to ask for either an email or phone number. I know my phone number is in the system so I'm going to enter my phone number here. This is my cell phone number here, so if I click okay, I'm actually going to get a text message on my cell phone that is right here. And be able to actually have an access code. I'm now verifying, I say I am who I said I was, so if I'm just a random student that has their parents' phone number and email I'm not going to be able to do this unless I had that phone access. But, everything we just saw right through the app, we can sign up to bring water, we can actually make a payment to actually pick up a child, and you'll notice that my other two kids were James Harrison and Antonio Brown. Since I entered my cell phone number, that's actually attached with another child, so I'm pretending to be a different parent on my cell phone than I am with the app. This child is Hines Ward. Anyone's picked up I'm the Steelers fan so these are all Steelers football players. Here we go, we can actually continue to pay for this event, $5, $5.65, enter my credit card information, click pay. So I've just actually done this without having to download the app. If a parent is offline completely, we have a way around that as well. The parent can literally organize with the teacher on this event. So I'm going to go refresh this page and we're going to come back into it and show you how I can view who's signed up for said event, and also maybe show you how people interact with events. So here's that same event. So if we log back into it, we can actually see the parents that have RSVP'ed, and for this event. So I can see that Jody Harrison, guardian of Antonio Brown has RSVP'ed, and if I have any other parents that need to RSVP, I can actually sign them in through this area right through here. Through the non-response and accepted areas. So I can actually sign in parents through here. And also I was kind of explaining about exporting these forms, I can literally export all these forms in an excel spreadsheet right here, so I'm just actually opening up the form itself, and click okay. And we can actually see who signed up for the parent signatures. And we can see student's name, guardian's name, email address, cell phone number. So very quick, very easy to actually do actionable calendars. One of the other ones I want to show you before we move to the actual announcement piece is going to be the parent-teacher meeting, which is the other actionable item calendar. This is a really neat piece because a lot of schools and districts will utilize a third party system, just for setting up parent-teacher meetings. So parent-teacher meeting 34. Here is the meeting times. And I want to do it for just for my class because again, I'm not wanting to notify all my other colleagues who also have the Sangha app here. And I'll do it for tomorrow. Then I pick the times that I want the meetings in between basically, so I'll do 8:30 to 2, I set the meeting length time. So this is the amount of times that I'm meeting with the actual parents. I can do 15 minutes, I mean I can literally set it anytime I want, I'll just do 20 minutes. And I can actually give myself a five minute break in between to kind of take a breath, reorganize for the next group of parents that I'm going to be meeting with. I then click create time. The system automatically populates all these different times for parents to meet with me. If I need to delete a time for say, you know, lunch or something like that, I can delete these two meeting times and actually have a lunch set up here. And I can then be, okay I'm happy to publish this to parents, click publish to parents. We're going to bounce back over to the app again so we can see what it looks like through the app. Again, click right on it, here's that parent-teacher meeting we just created, parent-teacher meeting 34. Again, Jane Driver is the organizer, click parent-teacher meeting, here are all those same meeting times that we just created right over here but on the app itself. So again, earliest time works best for me as a parent, I click 8:30 to 8:50. I just locked in my meeting time, so I can arrive at 8:25 knowing that the teacher is going to be ready for me at 8:30. Hopefully parents use this and teachers use this to kind of hold parents strong, like I have a meeting right here at this time, you selected your time, let's be fair to everyone else. I know it's probably not going to work that easy, but we will try to hold people accountable for the times they selected. So very quick, easy way to actually select meeting times for your children. That's Antonio Brown's meeting time, maybe we want to bounce over to James Harrison, my other son. I can just select the other meeting time right next to it so now you can see that 8:30 to 8:50 was selected for my other son, this one is selected for his brother. So I can literally do back-to-back meetings with this teacher if I have children in the same class, or I can kind of mix it up throughout the day if I have multiple teachers and just basically select them all. Parent-teacher meeting, really cool stuff. And then probably the piece that is going to be used, probably more so than anything, is going to actually be the messaging piece we actually have with Sangha. I'm just going to jump right over here and actually talk to you about messaging and how we can actually do it with Sangha. We have two types of messaging, we have the announcement piece right here and then we have actually our parent messaging piece. The parent messaging piece is really cool, it's very similar to remind, if any of you are familiar with that, that in that it actually allows parents to directly message with teachers or administrators back and forth. All the information is stored electronically within here. Some states mandate that any electronic communication between teachers, administrators, and parents be stored for, you know, Infinity. It is with Edlio and Sangha, so we have that right to hear. So it's also securing the privacy of both teachers, administrators, and parents, knowing that they don't actually have your phone number on here. So parents can't actually call teachers they can just message them through the app essentially. But the announcement piece is going to be where you really start seeing some cool stuff and some overlap with your current Edlio website. So if we actually go into announce here, and so I click new announce. And I'm going to use one of the pre-existing ones. We'll just use Thanksgiving holiday. Again, I can either announce it to the entire school, entire district, or be specific in who I'm announcing it to. And we can actually see the title of said event. We can actually see the body of this, so this could be as big as you would like. If we want to attach anything to this event, I'm just going to go grab one of my photos here, and we'll click okay. Now I've attached a photo to this. And down here is how do you want this message be sent. This is where we start really working on making parents happy with how they're receiving this message. First and foremost, the digest message we're seeing here is actually going to do a couple different things. First and foremost, it's going to allow parents to be communicated on the channel they wish to be communicated with, if that's through the app, that's through text, if that's robo-call, or the ability to actually be a human. And having the system call you and your voice be left there instead of the robo-call, or through email. So we'll leave four different communication channels. But the nice thing with a digest if you're in a setting where you have multiple teachers like a high school, multiple kids within the school, the system is going to allow this digest to put all those different teachers' messages into one single digest, one single message. So parents are not being bombarded throughout the day with messages. That's one of the big things, parents don't like multiple redundant messages. This is going to completely eliminate that. Secondly, we have an immediate message, so this is something that again, is going to notify parents on the communication channel of their choice. It's just going to go out immediately as opposed to waiting to about 6 in the evening for everyone to leave those messages like the digest and then gather and send them. Immediate goes out immediately. And then lastly is going to be emergency. This is actually going to notify parents on every viable communication channel, not just the ones they wish, but if they are a parent that has the app, if they have email, if they're able to receive text messages, and of course if they have a phone. This emergency is going to contact them on all available channels that you have within the student database, the SIS system. So, it's going to do all available channels. And this is now where it's going to start overlap a little bit with your website because we don't want you to input notifications on Sangha's platform and then have to go and input those over to the Edlio website that you're currently using. With our system, and you have to have the right permission level, but you are able to actually post it over to your main school or district's news feed on your homepage. So you're not have to duplicate the same information in multiple systems. So it's going to allow you to send it over there. Most teachers of course, do not have this capability, so they'll just be able to post this on to their individual personal teacher page. So they'll be able to crosspost this over there. So again, making sure you're not inputting things multiple times. And then the other place where parents, and just information of course, is social media. Again, if you're linked up through social media, through the Edlio websites, you'll be able to push this out to your linked social media through Sangha. So we don't want you to have to go it all over the place to push out media. And if we're happy with this, I'm going to just take it off emergency, just to immediate. So we're happy with everything and I'm also going to send it to my class because I don't want to again, notify all my colleagues that I've downloaded this. I click send, and I'm going to bounce over here. And again, here's what this message is actually going to look like on the app. So Jane Driver again is the organizer, Thanksgiving holiday, remember no school, winter wonderland, it does not look like that in Austin, Texas right now. Really cool, really neat. The other thing that's going to hold parents accountable is if we actually refresh this page, we're going to be able to see who has actually viewed this event and how they viewed it. So bounce back into messages here, and we're actually going to look at the message I just sent out. So this is like the detail book. So this has been set to math class by Jane Driver. Obviously here's like the body of our story, little photo and it's been sent immediately and here's my class, here's all the students in my class, and you can actually see two people have viewed this on the app right here. So I can see that the person's email address, Jodi Harrison, this is that person's email address, have viewed this on the app at 11:29, 3:40 p.m. These two are brothers right here so that's why they're showing up at the exact same time. Hines Ward is actually going to be saying delivered and that's actually to my cell phone right here, so I haven't actually viewed that message on my cell phone yet, that's why it just says delivered. If you have, if you view it, if you got deliver it to a landline and it goes to someone's voicemail, it will actually say left voicemail on here as well knowing that you reached someone's landline and it left a voicemail correctly. So again, you're holding everyone accountable that has viewed this if they say I didn't get the message, you can literally go back in the system and say our system actually shows you viewed it, on this platform, on this time, at this day. So that's pretty much the Sangha platform in a nutshell. Very last piece you might be wondering about is this section about classes right here. This is actually just allowing teachers or administrators to go in and actually edit individual classes that we see within the school or district. You can have different organizers, these are all again, the teachers within the class. Templates are going to actually be the release forms, those digital signable forms or templates. And then payment is going to be, you know, where these payments are going to. Again, most people are not going to see the majority of these on here, they're not going to be able to see organizers, templates, or payments if they're just a regular teacher. They will be able to see students, but only their classes that they organized. So again, permissions based. And if we need to bounce back to the Edlio side of it, we can come up here to my name, Jane Driver, JD here, and go back to the Edlio website. And now we're back on the Edlio side of things. The Edlio CMS. So that's everything really to do with Sangha. There's a lot of really neat stuff coming around the corner that I don't want to kind of get into too much. But if anyone does have any questions about anything, free to give me a call. Again, my name is Matt Woods. You might have saw my email on there, it's really simple. It's Matt@Edlio.com. If you need to contact me via phone call, my phone number is 512-551 0494. And again I thank you all for your time today. Feel free to ask any questions, shoot me an e-mail, give me a call, I'll be happy to help in any way. Have a great day, bye!

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