Schools are moving toward admin tools because of the increase in digital-first communication. Gone are the days when schools would hand out letters to students. Instead, it is all done via news posts on a school website or email.

You also have to remember that there is now an expectation for faster, clearer communication with parents. Parents want all information at their fingertips, and they want that information in an easy-to-read format. Digital offers this.

On top of all of that, there is now bigger administrative pressure on teachers. Therefore, teachers want to make their lives as much as possible. Digital admin tools allow this.

What a School CMS Actually Does

A content management system, or CMS for short, allows for more centralised website management. Almost everything on the website attached to the CMS can be updated from a single administrative panel, with barely (if any) technical skills required. A CMS is almost as easy to use as a word processor.

The CMS allows for easy, rapid updates to news, policies, events, and class pages. Old school websites could have taken hours and hours to update, since you’d need to tinker with code. A CMS allows these changes to be made in minutes, with no code tinkering required.

A CMS allows for role-based access, ensuring that teachers and office staff can only update the pages they need to.

Time-Saving Benefits for Teachers

While having a CMS is handy for keeping parents and staff members up-to-date with important information, there are also a few major time-saving benefits for teachers.

Quick and Simple Page Updates

As we said, no technical knowledge is required. If a teacher knows how to operate a word processor (e.g. Microsoft Word) then they can get to grips with updating pages in a CMS.

In minutes, a teacher can update class pages, put homework online, and add photos.

Consistent Information Across the School

A CMS reduces duplicate work. Everybody will be using the same templates and tools. It makes things a whole lot easier, and cuts down on a bit of the admin related to updating school websites.

If a school is set up with the right CMS, then everybody will be using the same templates, which ensures consistency in the style of content posted.

Automated Workflows & Notifications

With scheduled posts, teachers can update their content whenever they have free time. Posts can be scheduled as far into the future as a teacher wants. This can help to automate quite a lot of the content posting process, with many schools who opt for a CMS planning their content very far in advance, meaning they are not stressed getting the right information out at the right time.

Schools need to ensure that their websites are kept up to date, so you’ll be pleased to know that a CMS can offer automated alerts for when content may be out of date or missing information, ensuring issues are caught quickly.

How Online Forms Streamline School Administration

While teachers will find using a CMS handy, it is the school’s administration who will often stand to see the most immediate benefit, with much of their work reduced massively.

Replace Paperwork with Instant Digital Forms

With a CMS there is no need to produce paperwork for permission slips, absence reporting, trip sign-ups, and payments. It can all be accomplished with a digital form.

This means no more lost slips (students are notorious for this), and no manual data entry. Once a form is filled in, the data is automatically inputted into the system.

Automated Data Collection

School administration won’t need to input data manually. This reduces the chance of errors and saves a significant amount of time. This is important, since school administration is now under more pressure than ever.

Since all submitted data is stored in the same place, it is easy to retrieve. It’ll take seconds. No more fumbling through small pieces of paper!

Fast Response Times

Parents can submit information from any internet-connected device they want, whenever they want. It’ll take just a few minutes. Staff will be able to have access to this information instantly.

Benefits for Parents

While parents won’t be able to edit the content on the CMS, they will benefit significantly from a school deploying a CMS as the back-end to their website:

• Faster access to school information. Everything they need to know, assuming a school puts effort into updating the site, can be found easily.
• They can access the information through their mobile device.
• Allows them to quickly submit forms (such as those we mentioned in the previous sections), whenever and wherever.
• Reduces miscommunication and delays.

Real-World Time Savings (Examples)

Schools can do a lot with the right CMS solution. Here are just a few examples of how time can be saved by utilising this technology:

• Updating school policies can take 2 minutes instead of 20. This is because no technical knowledge is required, and updating a policy involves nothing more than typing the new words into the system.
• Forms, including trip forms, can be sent to parents in seconds. Assuming the parent is ‘on the ball’, responses can be set back in minutes. No waiting around for students to take letters back to their parents, and the school hoping they give a quick response.
• Absence reports can be processed automatically. No need for the school administration to be handling countless phone calls in the morning.

CMS Benefits for Schools

Digital communication tools, such as a CMS, can significantly reduce the workload for teachers and admin staff. A CMS will allow something to be updated in minutes which, prior to that, would have taken 10-20x as long.

Parents benefit from faster, clearer communication. This ensures that parents always know what is going on in a school.

To enjoy these benefits, a school should invest in a high-quality school-focused CMS. School Jotter is one of the leading performers in this category. It has been designed from the ground-up to ensure that schools can quickly deploy the right website and information they need for their staff, students, and parents.

Get in touch to learn about our CMS, website design, or marketing services.

Teaching requires a great amount of patience, mindfulness, compassion and commitment. It is not an easy job as many would assume. Teachers usually have to play many roles and show many faces to enhance the student learning experience.
With that in mind, we have done some research on the top do’s and don’ts of teaching in the classroom, which we hope new teachers will find helpful.

Make your life easier with School Jotter, a great content management system and hosting solution that provides you with the necessary tools and apps to make your teaching outstanding.
Imagine a classroom, seemingly ordinary, where every student is deeply engaged, their eyes alight with curiosity. This isn’t a scene from an idealistic movie; it’s the reality created by a teacher who understands the subtle art of influencing young minds. This teacher knows that in the world of education, akin to Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of the ‘tipping point’, small things can make a big difference.

 1. Do: Connect Beyond the Curriculum In a small town, there was a teacher who found a way to reach a disinterested student by talking about skateboarding, a shared passion. This simple connection transformed the student’s attitude towards learning. Like the ‘stickiness factor’ in Gladwell’s theories, personal connections make ideas and lessons more engaging and memorable. Teachers who find common ground with their students create an environment where learning extends beyond textbooks.

 2. Don’t: Underestimate the Power of Expectations Consider the ‘Pygmalion Effect’ – a psychological phenomenon where higher expectations lead to an increase in performance. A study once showed that students, randomly selected but touted as ‘likely to succeed’, actually performed better. This wasn’t due to their inherent abilities but the changed expectations of their teachers. In teaching, the expectations set can either be a barrier or a catalyst for student growth.

 3. Do: Embrace the Mavericks There was once a student who constantly challenged conventional methods. Instead of suppressing this unconventional thinker, a perceptive teacher encouraged this curiosity. This encouragement led the student to excel in a project, inspiring peers to think differently. Like Gladwell’s ‘law of the few’, a teacher’s support for the mavericks can create a ripple effect, fostering a culture of innovation and critical thinking in the classroom.

 4. Don’t: Neglect the Small Moments Gladwell’s concept of ‘thin slicing’ – making quick judgments – is often seen in teaching. A teacher’s spontaneous decision to praise a student’s work can boost confidence significantly. These small moments, though seemingly insignificant, can be pivotal in a student’s academic journey. Teachers need to be mindful of these interactions, as they hold the power to change a student’s perception of learning and self-worth.

 5. Do: Cultivate a Culture of Curiosity A creative teacher once turned a rigid lesson plan into a journey of discovery, allowing students to explore topics beyond the syllabus. This approach resulted in heightened student engagement and deeper understanding.

Teachers who encourage exploration understand the ‘law of the few’; they act as connectors, mavens, and salesmen, spreading the virus of curiosity among their students.

In the world of teaching, just as in the dynamics of social change that Gladwell describes, the smallest actions can be the tipping points.

Whether it’s through creating personal connections, setting high expectations, encouraging unconventional thinking, paying attention to the little things, or fostering curiosity, teachers have numerous opportunities to make a significant impact. Just like a carefully placed domino can set off an entire chain, a teacher’s actions, no matter how small, can set the course for a student’s future.

Get an outstanding website design for your school in the UK.

Take advantage of our special offers!!

One of the ways to help your school save money while obtaining a great bespoke website is to take advantage of our special offers. For a limited time, you can access the premium version of our school website design and our CMS School Jotter service for a discounted price.

Contact us today to see how these special prices can help you upgrade and improve your school’s website design.

Bespoke School Web Design And Content Management System

A bespoke school web design is a website that is specially designed for your specific school. It is a unique opportunity to get a great website design for schools in the UK.

A good primary school website design will help enrollment as prospective students and parents will see what your school is all about. What is more important is that no one else will have the same message or design as your school.

Your school website design will be unique to your institution and provide a positive message to all your website’s visitors. Our special programs, like CMS, ensure that your teachers and staff can manage, post, and communicate easily and effectively.

With ease of navigation, your school website design should attract and hold website visitors on site for a lot longer. Getting to know you is important if you expect the surrounding neighbourhood to send their children to your school.

If you tour the internet very often you can see many website design for schools in the UK that are in need of our special programs as well as our special offers. While many are good website designs tweaking and enhancing them is always a good move to make.

Keeping your school’s website design nice and fresh pleases the search engines and gets you a better ranking. That is where our special offers and programs come in.

They will help you tweak what you already have and make it more interesting, more fun to visit and engage prospective students and parents better. Take the time to utilize our special offer as you win in implementing it.

Attractive Templates And Numerous Useful Features And Add-Ons

Sometimes it can be difficult to come up with new ways to say what you want to say on your school website design. All the good ideas seem to be taken and not available. Trying to think outside the box may not fit your school’s image or reputation.

But do not worry, there is creative help. Once you sign on to our programs, you can take advantage of the many website design templates our company offers.

These templates help you create a more exciting website that is very interesting to read and look at. The templates also help you incorporate images and videos that capture the attention of parents as well as their children.

Make your school website design better by employing our special templates. Not only that but we also offer some great features that add a lot of pizzazz to the look of your website.

Plus, these features ensure that your website visitors can easily navigate to other pages seamlessly and quickly. Making exploring your website easier is a great way to rank and get more eyes on your school.

Finally, with our many add-ons, you can create a great website design for schools in the UK. Be unique, innovative, and creative all at the same time with our special offer and add-ons.

This is a unique opportunity for you to enhance your school’s image and reputation. Take it while the offer lasts and help your school stand out from the crowd. Just stay within reason and you should be fine.