Videos

Improving Communication With Sangha Webinar

Added Sep 21, 2018 •

Copy this URL:
Embed code:	<iframe class="edlio-embed-player" type="text/html" width="640" height="360" src="//help.edlio.com/apps/embed/?v=193296" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Change dimensions

Learn how Edlio's new parent communication app, Sangha, can help your school communicate more effectively with parents! In this webinar, we dive into Sangha's actionable calendar and parent-teacher meeting features.

Show Transcript

Alright I'm going to go ahead and get everything started here, again if anyone has any questions please go ahead and put it in the chat area and Shannon should be able to to answer those for you, but again my name is Matt Woods and we're going to be looking at Sangha here. So I'm assuming most everyone that's joining us is probably an Edlio customer because I know we pushed this out through the Edlio system itself so that is one of the first key aspects of Sangha is that it actually will sync up to your Edlio website so teachers, administrators, faculty members do not have to remember another username or password to login and utilize the Sangha system. It's going to allow you to actually log in from the back of your website. We're looking at a single school here - Hamilton Elementary - "Home of the Fighting Avocados" and we're going to log into the back of their system just like you would with a normal Edlio website. We're going to login here as a Webmaster so we actually have the entirety of the back end at our fingertips. This is probably going to look very similar to most of your sites. The one difference is going to be Bill Sangha portion right here in the top right corner because again it's a single sign-on from the back end of our system. So we're just going to click that and we're going to jump over to the Sangha platform where we can actually do our messages and in this demo, this instance today, we're going to be really looking at the calendar piece which is what it drops us directly into. The nice thing about Sangha is we actually do connect it to your SIS or "SIS" platform so all of the classes, all the rosters, all the parent contact information is already going to be in the system and it's going to do a nightly update on that, so if there are any new students coming to the school, there are any new classes created within your SIS system, once you do that in there, it's going to nightly sync with Sangha and pull into the platform here. So, with that being able to sync up, you don't have to maintain multiple databases, which is a huge concern and something we try to alleviate with Sangha but, some of those really cool aspects of it are going to be on the calendaring side and some of those, like I mentioned before I'll kind of just hover over one here are going to be the ability to actually create these actionable items within the calendar portion. And this, what we're looking at right here, we're seeing everyone's calendar. When you are a parent or when you are a teacher, you only see your particular class that you're teaching, where you only see the events in your child's class, so the calendar is going to be actually personalized for you as a parent or you as a teacher which is really really nice as well so we're not overwhelming anyone with so much information, so much data. But again, we're logged in as a Webmaster so we see everything and you can see as I hover over this one called "Ivan's Museum Field Trip" here, there's these five little buttons at the bottom that say RSVP, Volunteer Form, To Bring, and Payments. And all those, I think pretty self-explanatory. A parent can RSVP for an event, a parent can volunteer for an event, they can digitally sign forms which is probably one of the bigger aspects of the system, they can volunteer to bring items, or they can even do payments for a single calendar event. The other nice thing that you can actually do is parent-teacher conferences right within Sangha as well so these buttons allow parents and teachers to interact, basically lockdown places, times, fill out forms, everything like that and keep everything organized in a nice neat one entry point so you're not having to maintain and manage multiple platforms to do this in. All in one streamline system. So let's kind of jump into it and actually create an event, then we can actually, I have a little emulator here up so we can actually see what it looks like for a parent once a teacher actually creates an event so I'm going to go in here and we're going to create a new calendar event, obviously just by clicking on the calendar event, and once we pop in here, we will see there are three different types of events we can do: Quick Remind, Signup Events, and Parent Meetings. Like I say it needs to be called parent-teacher meetings, a little more easy to understand. But Quick Remind is just like any other normal calendar event you're doing right now. Sangha can actually sync up with Google calendars currently and we're going to be releasing hopefully Office 365 here in a bit but it will sync up with Google Calendar so if everyone is comfortable with Google Calendar right now, you can still pull that into Sangha for all of your regular calendared events, and then use Sangha when you need to create these actionable items because it is a smarter system than a current calendar - any current calendars out right now. So that's what quick quick remind is. The Signup Events are those actionable items, those RSVP, Volunteer Forms, Items, and Payments. And then lastly are going to be the parent-teacher scheduler. So everyone can kind of get an idea of what Quick Remind does so I'm not going to spend really any time on that at all. I'm going to jump into the real difference-makers in our system which are going to be in those actionable items. So I'm going to start with the parent sign-up, or excuse me, the sign-up events right here. And we'll go - Sangha Sangha Webinar Sangha Webinar Signup Here's our title of our event. The description Welcome to Sangha Welcome to Sangha is our description. This could be as long as you'd like right here. There can also be an attachment if you want a picture, a PDF document, whatever you'd like to title it within here. Location obviously is already filled in for us. Obviously a calendared event is going to need a date so we'll go ahead and do you do the 29th, we'll do a Saturday and I'm going to do a timed event from 8:30 to 2:30. You could also do a repeating schedule, you can actually see right through there as well. And then finally, since we aren't, again, logged in as a Webmaster, we do see everyone's calendar that is on here so teachers, administrators, faculty members will be able to actually use this themselves, but again it's going to be permission-based so if I'm only the organizer of "Matt's Class" here, that is the only item that is going to appear in this checkable box right here, these checkable boxes. If I have more than just one class I could select from all of them, but for instance, I'm just going to send this to my particular class. I'm not alerting all of my colleagues who also have classes on here. But, then we come down to actually creating those items, those actionable events and the first one we're going to look at is RSVP and the first aspect of that is going to be this deadline date and this again is one of neater features and it does actually roll across a couple of these different actionable items. The deadline date, what it really is, is it actually will automatically remind or re-notify parents that have not filled out the RSVP for their child's event, so if our deadline date is the day before our event on the 28th since our events on the 29th, 3 days out from that event, the parents that have not RSVP'd will get an automatic re-notification. The day before our deadline date, again, a re-notification if they still haven't acted. The morning of our event, last re-notification so it's automatically trying to get parents more involved when a parent does RSVP, they don't get any more of those re-notifications. It says you've selected that you're going to come so we're not going to bug you anymore. So that's one of the really nice things is we're not bombarding parents on multiple platforms. We've streamlined them into one system and again, parents actually have the ability to see items on your app, like we're going to see in a second, on email, on text message, and on voicemail with this platform. So that is really nice that they have four different options to basically interact with it. With Event Capacity, kind of self-explanatory, we'll just do $500, and number of guests allowed per student, we'll just do four as a random number. We can then move over to the Volunteer Section, so now we've created an RSVP, we didn't save anything we just moved right to the next section you see that little checkbox there in the RSVP. Now, we can actually go help out the teacher. So volunteering opportunities called, "Help Out the Teacher" if you want to create any notes. Three-legged man race is going to be what they're helping the teacher out with but the nice thing is since our event is from 8:30 to 2:30 that's a six-hour-long event. That's a long time to ask a parent to volunteer. So that's why we actually have these little shifts available. And if I actually click "add shift," it's going to start that very first shift at the beginning of our event at 8:30 if you need to modify that you most definitely can but it will automatically start it at the start of the event time and I'm just going to do an hour-long shift with one sign up per shift. So now, we actually had one shift created, I just want to swing down and we can see a button that rolls all the way across. I clicked "add another shift" and then it took that logic from the first button and replicated it to the next one so it created another hour-long shift with one more signup. If I keep doing this all the way to the end of our event at 2:30, we obviously have 6 one-hour long events as opposed to 1 six-hour long event, so then parents can actually sign up for each one of these hour-long shifts as opposed to saying "I'm just going to sign up for 6 hours" which isn't probably very feasible for those parents. Excuse me, I took a drink of water, then we just saved our task. If we wanted to create another volunteer task for this single calendar item, we could do that, but again for times sake, I'm going to move over to "Items to Bring" so I'm going to bring, you know, a case of water. I can ask for five different people to bring this if I wanted to again, click "save item" and again, you know, bring hot dogs. I'm going to ask three people to bring hot dogs. You see those "items to bring" and the volunteer are pretty similar to each other, but then we come to forms. Forms are probably the single-most fawned over part of this because what we do is we actually digitize your forms for you. We actually say "hey, during the onboarding process, give us all of your forms and we are going to build them into the system for you and then once we build them into the system for you, we're not done there. What we're also going to do is we're going to do what's called "mapping." So we're going to map individual form items, say such a student name or address or cell phone or email to your students so once you fill out a particular form and you add this information in here, any other forms that asks for that information are going to be automatically filled in and what we called "mapped." The only thing we will never map is going to be the parent signature because obviously we always want parents to actually give us that written permission on here, but if we're mapping everything, when this form comes to a parent, it's almost all filled out hopefully for parents and all they have to do is write off that signature on there saving parents a lot of time and again saving teachers a lot of time because they're not having to print these off, send them home to students, hoping the students give them to parents and then bring them all back to the teacher. This is all done electronically nowadays so there's a lot of soft cost and soft time savings here. But we also again have one of those deadline dates like we saw on the RSVP, so it will automatically re-notify parents that have not filled out these forms. Really nice feature, so a parent might fill out the RSVP but they forget to fill out the forms, the system won't keep reminding them if they haven't filled out one of the other. If we want to then, we can move on to the next one. The next item is going to be what we call "Payments" because we can actually collect electronic payments through the system. We actually use a system called Stripe to actually do the electronic payment. It's a free service to actually sign up for and why and how it's free is because it actually charges the parents a service fee when they want to actually pay by credit card. It's 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction just to kind of quantify that. It's $0.46 on a $5 transaction fee so it's $5.46 in total to the parent. Stripe gets $0.46 and the school collects the $5. But, there's different types of campaigns that we can kind of select from in here so we have the Fixed Fee, Fundraising or Donations, or Items or Tickets. So you kind of pick whichever one you want here. I'm just going to do the tickets one. Let's do football tickets and again I was getting $5 so we can actually see that quantification there and then you can have different accounts for this money to actually flow into so you can actually become best friends with the finance person because they will hug you because you can make their life easier tracking all of this, all the payments going to a field trip or going to a field date, something that needs to be collected monetarily. This is a really nice way to be able to do that. There's also an option in here to even track information or track funds for cash or check. So, if a parent doesn't want to pay that transaction fee, you can actually track it as an organizer of this event for those. There's also the ability to cover the payers fee if you want, if you'd like, so essentially Stripe would just send you a bill at the end of the month saying these are the payer fees that we need to recoup. It does give you the option, same thing with the deadline date we've seen on the forms and the RSVP, you can even ask questions on here so if you are selling like spirit merchandise or something like that you can say, "what shirt sizes?" "What shirt sizes?" But, if we're happy with everything that we're seeing here, we can really go "Publish to Parent" and I'm going to bounce over here to my app. And you're going to see it come through in real time here so I have an app on here that I'm kind of representing a parent. So we see this come through on the app as an RSVP for the Sangha webinar signup event so I can actually tap on this event and go directly into the event we just created. So I already have an event up here, it's going to move over there. So here's our brand new event so Sangha webinar signup event: the 29th at this time and location, the title or description is "Welcome to Sangha," Jane Driver is the organizer of this event, the person I am signed in as currently. Now we can actually look at this event and take action upon those items so I can jump in here and go "I want to go RSVP." So both me my wife are attending so I'm going to select 2. Click done, the check. Now I'm actually sending this RSVP in real-time back to the organizer, Jane Driver, in our instance here. Who's coming this event and how many of the 500 spots are taken. You know if I want to be nice and volunteer, what works best for my schedule as a parent is that first availability - that 8:30 to 9:30. I'm going to go ahead and lock down that time for me as a volunteer so you see I went from orange to green. If I wanted to I can sign up for more, if I wanted to cancel I can just tap it again and I will cancel that volunteer slot and open it back up for anyone else. Items to bring, obviously very similar. I'm just going to go ahead and say I'm going to bring a case of water. You're going to see it move from 4 available to 3 available. And then I'm going to go into the forms. The forms again are really nice because it actually does allow you to select whichever student needs to actually have the form completed here so I just have one student in my "My Demo" account here so I'm just going to select Hines Ward, my only student here, so I'm going to select Hines. Here pops up a little electronic consent form. Essentially with Sangha, the same things as pen and paper. It's just an electronic version. I click agree and now it pulls me into the form here. So here's our permission use photography. I can read through all this I can come down here and I can actually see that I have some information that's already saved on here, so my students names auto-populated, my address is auto-populated, followed by whatever that is and one of those, probably my email and phone number are what those are supposed to be. I just popped in some gibberish there. But you'll see the parent signature is never filled out so you can see there's a start button right there but once I actually click on the parent's signature and start entering my name, it goes from start to submit. So now I can actually, once I type in that, I can click submit and I've just filled out my form and sending it back to the teacher in this instance. Super quick, super easy, you saw how fast that was. The last one is obviously going to be the credit card payment here so I'm going to come in here and decide to make crack so there's our football tickets, there's our unit price, quantity is 1 right now. Total is $5.46. You can even see the question I put in there: what shirt size? So if I want to, I could say, you know, 1 large or if I want to change the quantity I can go in there and select 3. Click done and you'll see the transaction fee and the total amounts due do modify. Credit card information, to be able to punch that in right here. You can save that as a parent as well and then once you're done with that, click "pay with card." Obviously, we didn't enter any credit card information in there, but again, pretty self-explanatory. So that is one way to actually input the information into Sangha through the app. You can do everything we just did right from the app, right through email, or even through a parent portal on the front end of your website. So if people don't have the app or email, you can actually go in through the web calendar portion of your website because Sangha will take over your current Edlio calendar and you can actually interact with events directly on the calendar so that's actually not an actual one, sorry, let's go to Alumni Dinner, let's see what this one is. So you can see this one says "signup for events." I'm going to go ahead and sign up and it's essentially asking me "who are you?" so I'm going to enter my cell phone in here because it's going to cross reference with my cell phone, who my child is and if I actually have access to the system because we don't want to just have anyone have access to it and you see it says "access code." It actually sent my cell phone an access code that I'm actually going to type in here so 4-9-5 7-6-9. So, I'm now entering the information we saw on the app through a parent portal. So this is a different one, this is one we haven't created, we didn't create right now, but you can see it has a lot of the same information on it right here. I'm just entering it through another entry point. So that's kind of one part of our actionable calendar. The other part we're going to quickly look at, again I know we're running up on the time I kind of allotted, that most people allotted for, is we're going to actually create a parent-teacher meeting scheduler. And that again is done right through when you create a calendar event so we go to, this time instead of Signup Events, Parent Meetings. So I'll click parent meeting - PTM 34. Again, description - So here we come down to my class again and the nice thing about parent-teacher meetings are you just select the date or multiple dates even so I'm going to do multiple dates, I'll do a date for this Saturday and I'm going to do another one for this Sunday so we have two dates for our parent-teacher meetings and if your school says we're going to do parent-teacher meetings on these two days between 1:30 and 4:30 and they're going to be 20-minute-long meetings and you're going to have 5-minute breaks in between so you as a teacher can input this information or as an administrator can input this information into the system, click "create meeting times," and the system will automatically pre-populate all of these meeting times based on the information you just gave us so we start our first one at 1:30 to 1:50 so on down the line. If you wanted to delete a meeting or add more slots you can do this on an individual basis but what this looks like for parents, again if we've entered all the information correctly, is click "publish to parents" and bounce over here to my app again, and we see we have a new notification so "Choose your time for the upcoming Parent-Teacher Meeting - act now before all the time slots are taken." So I can tap on this event, it's going to go into our calendar again and again it sees our old one we just went, it's going to move over to our parent-teacher meeting that we just created. So looks very similar, it only gives us one actionable item to do - that red dot. So we click on that and we see all of our time slots for our parent-teacher meeting. Again it knows if we have more than one child, my instance I only have one in Hines Ward here, but me as a parent, the latest time works best for my schedule. I'm going to go ahead and lock down that 4:00 to 4:20 time slot on that Saturday. So now I've basically told the teacher that that's my time slot, I told all the other parents that that's my time slot, no one else going to have that. Again, you can enter this through the app that we're looking at here, through email, or through the public portal that we kind of saw right here on this side right here. So that is kind of the system as far as the calendar aspect goes. You will see there are other aspects to it, there is a messaging part that we didn't really touch upon just because of times sake, there are auto-notices as well so you can actually have the system setup to do auto-notifications for attendance, for grades, for low lunch balances. The system is a very very flexible system and again it actually is going to sync up directly with your website so you don't have to remember different usernames or passwords, you can enter everything through directly to the website. Well that is the time that I kind of allotted for everyone today. We're going to kind of send everyone a recap that has joined us. Hopefully my colleague, Shannon, is able to answer questions for everyone. If we didn't, we'll most certainly answer those once we actually jump off the meeting. But again, my name is Matt, if there are any questions anyone has please feel free to call your rep or you're more than welcome to reach out to myself. You can shoot me an e-mail, it's very simple, it's Matt, M-A-T-T, Matt@edlio.com I hope everyone has a great day, a great weekend, we'll talk soon, bye.

28:22 [Edlio Webinar] Teacher Pages Featured
Join Edlio for a 30-minute webinar about Teacher Pages. We cover how to create and update Pages, best practices for sharing content, and everything else you need to know to use your Pages to effectively reach parents and students.
Uploaded Mar 20, 2020
30:05 [Edlio Webinar] Teacher Pages Refresher Featured
Join Edlio to learn the ins and outs of the Edlio CMS! You'll leave with actionable steps your school or district can take today to update your website, better engage with parents, and more. Bring your questions for a Q&A session at the end!
Uploaded Jan 24, 2020
27:58 [Edlio Webinar] Teacher Pages for the New School Year Featured
In this 30-minute webinar about Teacher Pages we cover how to create Pages, best practices for sharing content, and everything else you need to know to use your Pages to communicate with parents and students for this upcoming school year, whether classes are held in-person or virtually.
Uploaded Jul 23, 2020. Also listed in Back-to-School
19:29 The Beginner's Guide to Building Pages [Edlio Webinar] Featured
Are you new to Edlio? Or do you want to learn how to improve your skills building Pages? This webinar is for you! In this beginner-friendly session, you'll learn how to:

- Create and update Pages
- Share content effectively
- Organize your Page Management based on your needs

We'll also cover best practices for building Pages that are both informative and engaging.
Uploaded Jun 02, 2023
30:03 [Edlio Webinar] Overview for Administrators Featured
In this Edlio, we highlight how administrators can best use their school or district’s Edlio Website. We share website tips that are easy to implement and can have a big impact on your school or district’s communication with parents and students.
Uploaded Mar 25, 2020

Videos

Improving Communication With Sangha Webinar

More videos in My Edlio Webinars