Project Overview

Schoolbox mobile (SBM) is mobile web app that extends the Schoolbox community portal and learning management web application. Designed for students and teachers to access content on-the-go across mobile and tablet devices including iOS and Android. The Schoolbox web app currently powers a growing number of leading independent K-12 schools in Australia and OS with a client base including Melbourne Grammar School, Melbourne Girls Grammar, The Kings School, Shore School and many more.

Organisation

Alaress

Team

Project Manager: James Leckie
Creative Director: Matthew Sambell
Development Team: Christopher Cohen, Matthew Day

Project Brief

As schools embrace the bring your own device (BYOD) policy and students are more likely to carry mobiles than schoolbags to school, Schoolbox mobile offers students and teachers a mobile friendly, cross device tool that extends the Schoolbox platform. The app has been designed to adapt to a broad range of devices and delivers content to users in a form taking full advantage of touch based interfaces. Consume on-the-go content, users can:

- Check their timetable
- Check where they’re meant to be right now, or next period
- Keep up-to-date with recent school news
- Access current information and what’s happening with their subjects and extra-curricular activities
- View upcoming assessments. What work is due when, and where
- View their calendar to access relevant events

Project Innovation / Need

Schools recognise the need to meet the growing demand for mobile solutions for their students, parents and greater community. Schoolbox mobile (SBM) offers an integrated, web-based solution that addresses these immediate needs. Complementing the Schoolbox web app, SBM is light weight, fast loading, cross device and even works offline. The education software space currently lacks mature, feature rich mobile solutions. SBM addresses the need for pocket-based learning and allows connection to to school systems regardless of user context. The user statistics we’ve gathered through our application highlight the exponential growth in smartphone take-up in schools and SBM, takes advantage of move for school policy to support BYO device. Going mobile removes the constraints students face whilst largely still confined to books, diaries or (if the school is tech-savvy) desktop computers for the delivery of eLearning.

SBM’s content is driven through powerful integration with each school’s student management system (SMS). Our core web application supports a dynamic connection to the SMS database tying a knot in what is widely regarded as a school’s most critical system. This solves a major data re-entry issue for schools with further integration being achieved through advanced calendar integration.

User Experience

The SBM user experience is the result of hundreds of hours spent on UX and agile prototyping. The result is a user experience that is fast, responsive and most importantly intuitive for mobile users. Each deployment of our application is custom skinned and branded to maintain the School’s unique style. This ensures the users recognise and trust the application as it is clearly identifiable to the user and consistent with the existing school material.

To reduce load times, the bare minimum amount of data is transferred from servers so even on slow connections the application responds swiftly to user commands. The UI is simple, intuitive, has a well organised modular layout and takes advantage of iconography, gestures (eg. swiping) and more.

Project Marketing

SBM is a closed mobile web application and is only available to Schoolbox clients. It will be provided as an optional addon to the existing Schoolbox web application. In a close knit industry where everyone talks about their solution openly, we believe good marketing is achieved by keeping our customers engaged with our roadmap, development plans and regular updates on product information. Further marketing is conducted through sponsorship of targeted industry events and public speaking on eLearning and online education best practice.We are also active bloggers via our company website (http://www.alaress.com.au/category/schoolbox-2/) and share relevant information via Twitter.