MESSAGE TO OUR SCHOOLS ABOUT COVID-19

Clearly the priority issue in every school today is formulating a plan to deal with the effects of the Coronavirus. Some territories are already talking about the inevitability of having to close all schools for a period.

I wanted to write to all our schools and let you know how EdSmart has been preparing for such an event, and remind you of some of EdSmart’s functionality that may be of use in your preparations.

What is EdSmart doing?

We’ve created an internal policy – https://edsmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/EdSmart-Coronavirus-Policy.pdf – for how we as a company are dealing with Coronavirus. It includes ensuring our staff are aware of travel restrictions and their responsibilities around their own health, and that of the rest of the team.

Today, we formulated an internal plan of action across our departments to make sure everyone is briefed and ready if a significant proportion of our schools need to create and distribute large numbers of communications to their school community. 

This includes our engineering team reviewing scaling capabilities on our platform to maintain availability. The EdSmart technology platform already serves the needs of tens of thousands of users every day but we have built new monitoring tools to analyse anticipated volumes. These new tools will enable us to know in advance when the platform needs to cope with traffic and usage in significant excess of our historic averages.

We have proven systems in place for staff to work from home for short or extended periods – there is no reliance on personnel being present in our office. All of the EdSmart platform is hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud giving us complete redundancy for all elements.

How can EdSmart help you?

There are several ways EdSmart can help your school to prepare:

• Broadcast Templates pre-prepared ready for announcements, such as school closures to parents and students
• SMS-enabled to Broadcast to parents, as well as email (NB: if you want to SMS, make sure we have mobile numbers in EdSmart for your parents)
• A User Group containing all staff to copy them on Broadcasts and Slips
• Establishment of a ‘Whole School’ Student List for Broadcasts and Slips

Remember, EdSmart is a cloud-hosted service – we are not reliant on your internal IT systems – and you can access EdSmart from anywhere in your web browser providing you have internet access. 

If you utilise single sign on to EdSmart and this is hosted only on premises in your school, you may need to set up a separate user name/password to EdSmart in case your single sign on system is not available.

Our Success and Support Teams are available to assist you in whatever way you may need them. Just email [email protected].

Kind Regards,

Fiona Boyd, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer