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Round 2: Back-to-school with Sangha

Added Sep 12, 2018 •

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Join us for another back-to-school Sangha tutorial. Learn how the Sangha app can help your school communicate more effectively with parents, including how Sangha can streamline common back-to-school events.

Show Transcript

Hi everyone. I definitely want to thank you for joining us here on our webinar going over the Sangha system, and we're waiting for a few attendees to show up. We have quite a few people registered, so I'll give it a couple of minutes. I know we're scheduled to go at 2:30, but I'll go to like 2:32 before we actually get the ball rolling. I definitely want to thank everyone for joining us today. I'm going to be your presenter. My name is Matt Woods, and we're going to be going over how we actually can create messages and send them out to parents of students within our class just so you can kind of get an idea of what a day-to-day usage with a like system can be. So, like I said, I'm going to wait a few more minutes to give everyone a chance to get in here so that we can have everyone start on the same page. If anyone does have any questions, right now this is going to be a kind of one-way audio. I'm going to be speaking so you can hear. I'm going to have one of my colleagues actually answering questions in the chat function of the zoom meeting system we're all using here. If you do have any questions, please feel free to type in the chat and one of my colleagues will actually be able to answer that for you. Yes Angela, I did see your text, so I'm just waiting for my colleague Amanda who's going to be answering the chat to join us, and then we'll get started. I'm just waiting on the one person to join us, and there she goes. Alright, and we're going to go ahead and get started now that my colleague has joined us, and again if anyone does have any questions, please feel free to put in the chat, and my colleague Amanda will go ahead and get that answers for you. For everyone who joined us little bit later, my name is Matt Woods, and I'm going to be showing you our communication platform that we have here called Sangha. It's a really, really neat system. It's new to Edlio. We'e actually purchased company the company about a year ago. Now that we are really starting to promote it, it's getting a lot of traction because of the unique way it actually communicates with parents. We're going to actually be focusing on just the communication aspect of it, but the neat thing about Sangha is that it actually consolidates multiple platforms together into a single unified system. What I kind of mean by that is - Sangha allows communication for the one-way direct communication, you know the "School closed today due to weather" kind of statement messages that can go out school-wide, that can go out class-wide, or you can even drill down to an individual student and their parents and communicate that way. So the system is built to communicate with parents. There is some flexibility in how you can edit different groups to make it more of an internal staff communication as well, but we're really going to focus on the communication of the parent aspect today. We're going to actually log in through our Edlio website since I know that the majority of the people joining us today already have edlio websites. So, the system will connect with your Edlio website which is already a really neat function, so you do not have to log into another platform. You don't have to remember another username. It's logging in through direct through your Edlio website and then shooting over to the Sangha system. Again, the kind of 10,000 feet view of Sangha is it allows multiple ways of communication - direct one-way communication, two-way communication - so essentially text messaging with the parents - and then the third, which we're not going to look as much into today, is the the calendaring aspect or the actionable calendar portion. If anyone has any questions, again please put them in the chat and my colleague, Amanda will answer them for you. We're going to go ahead and get the ball rolling here, so I'm going to go ahead and - I already have my teacher page up here because we're kind of going to be referencing this back and forth - but I'm going to go ahead and log into the back of my Edlio website. So, I already have this window open here. This should be very familiar to everyone if you've ever logged into the Edlio website before. It probably looks very familiar. You might have a couple of different things if you're signing on with Google, Microsoft, or Canvas, but we are going to go ahead and sign in here as this Jane Driver, the teacher that I had on the opening page here. So, I'm logging in here as Jane Driver. Again, this part right here should look very familiar to most people. It might look a little bit different depending on your level of permission at the school or district, but generally pretty pretty close. The one thing that is going to be different is definitely going to be this top right corner that says Sangha right here. So, this is actually where we log into the Sangha platform. So, this is where everyone's going to log in. There's also a secondary way to log in, but for Edlio customers, this is going to be the main way we log in. We're logging in, and we're actually logging in as like a webmaster. So, we see everyone's information on here. When most teachers log in here, they are only going to see their individual class or groups that they are the the manager of, the teacher of, the is the coach of. So again, we're seeing everyones because we are the Web Master, but when most people login, they're only going to see  their third grade class. They're not going to see everyone else's information. This is that calendaring aspect that I mentioned. We're not really going to be focusing on this today because I want to make this a quicker webinar for everyone for time's sake here. So, we're just really going to be focusing on the messaging aspect which is the most common way that schools/teachers communicate with parents. So, we're going to really be focusing on this aspect, but the messaging part, like I said, actually has two different ones. It has the direct messaging which is, you know, "School closed today due to weather" - the kind of statement messages. It also has the two-way communication which we actually call Parent Messages right through here. So we're going to be looking at both of these aspects on here and really showing you how both of them function. The first one I want to tackle is by far and away the most common - those kind of statement messages. A lot of people use the systems that do voice and text messaging. Sangha actually allows you to communicate on four different message types - voice, text, email, and app. Instead of just voice or text, you have voice, text, email, and app. It's actually going to be tapping in and knowing this information and knowing how to send it via your student information system, your sis platform, your "sis" platform. We use a system called Clever to sync with the vast majority of SIS platforms out there so that is how we're actually pulling this data into the the system itself. It does a nightly sync, so it actually communicates and updates on a nightly basis. If you have a student coming into your school or going out of the school, a nightly rotation, a nightly sync, is going to pull information in or out as needed. So, that's where we're actually pulling the class rosters, the student information, and the parent contact information. So, I'm going to go ahead and jump in here and actually create a new message. I see we have some questions coming in, so hopefully Amanda's getting on those. I'm going to go ahead and create a new announcement here. So, I'm going to click "New announcement", and it's going to pull me into a system that's going to be very, very easy to decipher. We've built this so everyone has access to it - not just administrators but also teachers as well because we want that level of interactivity between parents and teachers to be as high as possible because the more the parents are engaging with the teachers the more they're engaged with their students and the better the overall relationship is going to be. The students then have a better chance of succeeding. Everyone is just going to have a much much easier process through the process of communicating. So, we're going to go ahead and create a new announcement here. Since I'm logging in, and I'm a webmaster, it's defaulting me to message the entire school, but just to kind of show everyone that might login from districts we have multiple ways to actually drill down to different levels. So, we can actually message an entire district if we wanted to if we have the correct permission level, or we can message the school kind of what we're doing right now, or we can drill down using this custom button right here down to an individual classroom on here. So, I just search for class called Matt's class, so my class, so I drilled down to my individual class. If I want to, I can actually drill down even farther to individual students and message parents of these individual kids within the class, so it becomes a very, very granular as far as how I want to message groups.  I'm just going to leave it as my total class right here, but also just to let you know as a side note you can also create what we call ad hoc lists. So, if you need to create groups that are not necessarily marked in your SIS platform in any form or fashion, you can actually do that by doing a CSV list using just a simple student ID. So, it's an Excel spreadsheet you populate the student IDs in this first column. It then coordinates with who that student is and then in turn who that parent is and how they wish to be contacted. So, it communicates - it gets all the information directly from the student ID. You can actually create one-off list, so you use those one-time lists for say like a bus route that's late, or you create maybe the football team, you know, that I students from all different grade levels and is not necessarily marked in the SIS system. You can create that as a group and message them throughout the year. There is also a non-student list, as well. So, if you maybe have a PTA group, that obviously is not going to be in the student information system in any way or the Alumni Class of 2014 or something, you can create groups of people not within the SIS system as well. So it's very nice that is included in their kind of flexible in how you want to use it, but again I'm going to actually go back. We're just going to message my particular class. If you wanted to, you could message different groups. You could come in here and message Mike's class well. I can kind of build these one-off lists and message multiple groups at a time or multiple students from however I want to search them. Again, we're going to save it as my one class that I have saved there. So, you see it pulled everything off Hamilton, and now it's just once one class. I'm going to create - let's just use a - like a homework assignment as this for this particular teacher. We're going to create a homework message that goes out to the parents so "Please read and review and write a two-page essay on Sangha. Here's our homework assignment - "Read and review", and the  description is Write a 2 page essay. So we're just going to have this be our homework assignment. If we want to, we can also attach a PDF to this. I'm just going to attach a little bit of an accessibility PDF here. If I want to, since this is going out via voicemail, I can actually have the system call my phone number and actually use the "Write a two-page essay on Sangha" as my voice as opposed to being a robocall that does go out. So, it goes out voice, text, email, or app again - through one individual editing point. You don't have to create multiple entry points for text, voice, email or app. It's just one entry point. Now, how do I  want to send this message out? So, I'm going to go ahead and send this message out immediately, but I'll also talk about these other aspects that we see. This message we're going to do, we're going to send this out to parents immediately. The other one that is actually open to most teachers- immediate and digest are available to most teachers. So, digest, and what digest does is digest still sends this message out immediately to parents on their preferred method of contact voice, text, email, or app, but at the end the day it's going to actually consolidate all those messages together. So, if you're a parent of a high schooler, and you have six or seven different teachers and they're all using this for homework assignments, you're still getting those instant messages, but at the end of the day at 6 p.m. in our instance here, you're actually going to get an email digest of all those messages in one nice neat little package - very similar to our teacher page subscriptions if any of you guys are familiar with those. So, it's very similar in how it creates a digest. The last one which is called Emergency is not available to most users. Only key administrators have this because it is far and away the most intrusive method of contact, and that is because it will reach parents on all available communication channels not just kind of the one they've designated as their preferred method - email, voice, text, or app - but all available methods of contact. Parents do have the ability to opt out of messages. We are FERPA certified. We do have several other certifications as well - I Keep Safe Certified as well as a certification for California. I believe it's CSPS. I might be wrong about that acronym, but we are certified for it as well. Again, I'm going to send this one out immediately. You might notice that there's actually some things down here that we have is well. The really neat thing about Edlio and Sangha together is you're going to get the ability to actually cross-post information not just directly to the parents but also over to the website. So, if we have the correct level of permission both on the website and on Sangha, we're actually able to send this message over to the school's news and announcements section, but again most teachers will not have access to the news categories. They're probably going to have access to their personal page. So, I'm actually going to send this message over to my class that is The History of Edlio. So, I'm going to send this message over to this class. I'm actually sending this homework assignment out to the parents so that they know it. I'm also going to post this over to my teacher page as well so that if anyone doesn't receive it through that message, they can also review it on my teacher page. So, we're going to send it over there. You know, maybe I have a Facebook or Twitter account for my class as well. I can cross-post this over to there, and you're starting to see how you can actually use this for more than just a teacher page. This can be a school-wide, a district-wide implementation but for our demo purposes here we're kind of keeping it on the most granular level we can which is individual teacher use. Again we can send this over to social media feeds as well, but I'm going to go ahead and send this over to my teacher page right now. I'm just going to click send, and I actually do have - oh, I don't have it up right now. Let me go ahead and do that. I forgot to bring this up. I actually have a emulator here of my iPod, so you can actually see what this looks like on the parent's end. Here is my little emulator here. So, as you can see, you would have noticed this if I actually had it up and going, but I have a message - "Jane Driver has just sent you a message. Please read and review." This is the homework assignment that we just created. You can kind of see it in the background. So, I can actually tap on this messaging, and again, this is if the parent is using App. If a parent is using email, they would get this through email. If they're doing a text, they would get it through text. They just wouldn't see the PDF that we attached. If they got the voicemail, they would just read the description of it. They again wouldn't see the PDF attached, but this is what the app looks like because it's most instantaneous one that I can do for our demo purposes. So, I'm going to tap on this notification on my iPod here, and it's actually going to pull up the message I just created. So, Jane Driver is the teacher that we're logged in as. She sent it to Matt's class. Read and review. There's our description - Write a two-page essay on Sangha, and here's our PDF attachment that we also attached with it. I'm just going to click on it, and it actually is going to open up this accessibility PDF and a new document. So, super quick, super easy. You saw how fast it came through. Email comes through just as fast. Voice and text is a little bit slower just because of the system itself, but it goes through at a pretty quick clip. I can get the exact numbers if anyone is wanting to see that, but the other nice thing is once you actually sent this out, you guys could do a little bit of spying on your pants if you wanted to. So, we can actually see all the children within this class, but we can actually see if their parents have actually viewed this message. So, I can actually see that Matt Woods has reviewed this message at this date and time right here, and it gives us a little bit of time stamp on there. So, you can really nicely and easily see everything. So, that's how we can create a message and what it kind of looks like with a little bit of analytics on the back end, but if we actually come over to our teacher page, we can actually see my teacher page here. I'm actually going to go down here and click on The History of Edlio because this is actually where we sent that message as well. So, here is actually that homework assignment that we attached with it. So, you know, here's the description - Study and write a report on how it can help your school or district. So, here's that homework assignment. Here's that PDF that we attached with it as well, so you can see how we cross-post this information not just to the parents directly, but also to the website. So if there's other Guardians involved they can also see this information. So that's a really nice, quick, and easy overview on the one-way communication with Sangha. I also want to take you on another little tour of this and show you the other ways that we can actually communicate with Sangha. So, this is actually again that iPod I have emulating here, and we have the Sangha app. The one on the left is the parent app. The green one on the right is actually the teacher app, so if don't want to interact with Sangha when creating a message through the desktop, I have the option of using the app on my smartphone here. So, we're giving teachers multiple ways to inject information out to parents. So if I want to, I can actually tap on that green app here, and we actually already happen to be this one. We can actually create a two-way communication with parents right within the app, or we can actually create an announcement which is just like we did earlier. You're actually going to see the one we just created - the Read and Review. That will auto-populate here in a sec. There's our Read and Review Sangha right there. You could also create calendared events directly through this app as well, but again for our purposes I want to make sure everyone's time is accounted for. We're actually show you how to do a two-way communication on the teacher app of Sangha. So, I'm going to kind of pull this down so that it's not distracting too much in the background even though my background is really messy right now. I'm going to go ahead and create a two-way message with a parent of a student in my class. So, I'm going to click that little plus symbol down here at the bottom. I am going to search for a student's name. So, I know a student in my class that I need to speak with. His name is Hines Ward, and if anyone is wondering, yes I am a Steelers fan. Also, yes we did somehow tie the Browns last night. I don't know how that happened, but here's all of the communication that I actually happen to have with Hines Ward or his parent in our instance here. This is all the information, and if you actually notice the date here - February 22nd - this is actually stores all the data for as long as you are in contract with Sangha itself. So, it actually will store all electronic communications to all parents. Some states like California, Colorado, Ohio, North Carolina are ones that pop into my head that I believe mandate any electronic communication be stored for open records purposes, so this platform does do that as well. If I want to message anyone here - I'm just going to go ahead and say Hi Hey just checking on Hines. I know that he wasn't at school today. So, this is the message that I'm going to send to a parent. This is a teacher sending it to a parent right now. So, I just click that symbol, and you'll see I just got another message that came through because this is actually on the parent's side now. So, the parent can click this app, and you're kind of seeing both since I have both on one device. Now we're on the parent side of it, so as a parent I can actually respond back - Yeah, he wasn't feeling good. As a parent, I can immediately respond back, and again we can bounce right back over to Hines here. We can actually now see - here's that message that the parent just sent right back - super quick communication, that instant gratification, that instant communication right back and forth. So, that's really all I wanted to show everyone today. I see there are quite a few messages coming through. Hopefully my colleague Amanda's able to answer them. Sorry if there's any Browns fans on here. Sorry if there's any Steelers fans on here as well. If you do have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me again. My name is Matt Woods, and I think my information should be included on the information or the flyer first. If it's not you can reach me at Matt M A T T @ edlio.com. I'll be happy to answer any questions. If you do know your salesman's rep, It doesn't have to be myself. Reach out to them, and they will be able to help you as well. I'm just the "Sangha specialist". So, I hope everyone enjoyed the quick little tour of the messaging aspect again. If there's any more questions feel free to reach out to myself or anyone else at Edlio. I'll leave the line open for a few more questions if anyone is still answering those. I'm actually looking at them myself right now. Hey, I see Josh is a fellow Steelers fan. Alright, well it looks like that's a lot of the questions, and I hope everyone has a great day. Enjoy the rest of the week! Bye.

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Round 2: Back-to-school with Sangha

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