Available initially through the iPhone Apps Store from the 21 June, the Loretto app promises to make it easy for parents and the whole school community to keep up to date with the School’s ever changing activities, timetables and news.
The initial launch of the app gives parents the School calendars, a news feed and the ability to tailor the app’s contents to their children’s extracurricular activities at their fingertips. Any changes to the information, such as a match being cancelled or a bus delay is instantly updated to the iPhone. A School news feed is also incorporated.
The second phase, due in September, promises even richer functionality for parents to exploit such as Google Maps showing venues of away sports matches, two-way alerts and ‘real-time’ sport match reports.
Linda Cessford, CEO of Apps Central says:
'As a working parent of a child at such a busy school, I sometimes found keeping up to date with new developments, school calendar additions and changes difficult. I didn’t always have access to the School’s website and could never place my hands on the paper calendar. I thought a simple app on my iPhone would be the solution. We approached Loretto with the idea and they had already had the same idea! We decided to join forces to develop the solution together.'
Loretto’s Headmaster, Peter Hogan adds:
'Schools like Loretto provide a rounded education for their pupils, which gives rise to a full and varied calendar of activities and events each term. This can be challenging for parents to keep up with. We use the School website and the School’s printed calendar, which shows each day of each term in detail, as our main channels for keeping our community informed.
'The addition of the Loretto iPhone app will not only give parents, staff and pupils another option for receiving information from the School but it also allows us to get updated information to our community quickly and efficiently. We can also use the text alert facility as a more efficient method than we currently use to target specific parents with a ‘real-time’ message about their child.'
Apps Central Ltd are already in discussions with a number of other schools keen to exploit this type of technology, and look forward to announcing many more features in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the Loretto parents who signed up to test the new app are delighted with this innovative approach of getting up-to-date information quickly to them from their children’s school.