Tuesday November 7, 2017, federal government of Nigeria announced how integration of ICT system into her business have saved N20 billion monthly. Benefits of ICT in Nigerian schools cannot be over emphasized.

A school manager that have not seen ICT need in managing his /her school is like one who have not seen need of ICT in Nigerian banking system where you get you connect with your account at anytime, anywhere.

In this blog, we are going to explain some benefits of school information management system as it regards to big schools and smaller schools. This blog is not written to make you to rust into subscribing to a School information management system that will not help your school business. We advise you to research well before so as to know if the features meet your needs.

School information management system enables institution daily activities to run in more smoother manner.

Growth and technology seem to be always in accompaniment of each other. Whenever and wherever you find one lacking you can also be sure that the other would not be there. This can be said about the domain of education as well. There is hardly any educational institution out there that has not been touched by this phenomenon known as technology. Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds – by a conservative estimate that is – in the last few years and they have embraced this change as they have understood how benefited they could be by them. After all, no one wants to get left behind in this day and age of technology.

How are schools embracing technology?

A big part of the schools’ embracing of technology has been using school information management system. It is not easy work, shaping and moulding the mind of today’s youngsters and as such a lot of work needs to be done behind the scenes. Even if you go back by a few years, schools would remain in touch with parents on a constant basis in an effort to apprise them of how well their wards were doing in school. As essential the task was, it used to be rather tedious as well.

Schools used to maintain a whole heap of registers just in order to keep track of whether students were attending school or not. A lot of data needed to be maintained as well as updated on paper on a regular basis. This is where school management system can come in and play such a major role by helping a school perform its functions in a smooth manner. With the help of this software, it can be possible for a school to perform its daily activities without any problem whatsoever. There are several reasons as to why an increasing number of schools is using this software on a regular basis.

An effective way of communication

One of the greatest benefits of student management software is that helps a school communicate in an effective way with the parents. With this software, a school administration would be in such a better position when it comes to sharing information and circulating. It would be able to do such work in a shorter span of time and in a much more efficient way too. With the help of such software, gone are the days when the schools needed to connect with parents regarding the condition of their child’s progress on a regular basis.

No longer do they need to communicate with their students all the latest things that may be happening in the school. All that the school staff now needs to do thanks to the data management systems for schools is connect with the parents online. This way, they are able to bridge the gaps in communication that may exist with respect to all the stakeholders – the parents, the students, and the school staff.

A much better way to store data

The concept of school management software has now made life much easier for the schools as they are able to store data much better than how they were able to do earlier.

In any case, all the schools have plenty of data to deal with and there is a whole lot of information that needs to be stored away properly and maintained. Earlier people had to do this on paper and that meant paperwork that never seemed to end and heaps of ledgers and files that were really hard to keep track of. On top of that, they took up a lot of space that could be used for much better purposes.

It was worse, that they could perish quite easily and thus there was always significant risk associated with them. It was rather hard to maintain them and for the person who was tasked with the job of maintaining them nothing could have been more boring. This is the reason why people are now relieved to such an extent that they can use software, something that their predecessors were never able to use. The best thing about software is that unlike paper they do not get scattered everywhere and would not get lost that easily.

Now schools are able to keep all their data in one place and update them as well. Since the data stored in computers is not perishable it requires a lot less time to maintain it. This also means that less time is needed as well.

Better work quality

This also happens to be one of the major advantages of using such software. This software functions with a greater amount of convenience when compared to the methods of yore. It is able to put information together in a correct manner, sends notification as and when such a task needs to be performed, and is able to manage documents in a much easier way. Since this is software it is possible to not err while using it to the same extent as paperwork. The major reason for such a statement is the fact that here the software is doing all the work on your behalf.

More advantages of such software

Apart from the fact that schools need to keep track of data such software also comes in handy when it comes to maintaining and tracking data related to other important people in the system, such as teachers. It can be said without a shadow of a doubt that these systems have made life a lot easier for one and all.

It also helps that these products come with a wide range of features that really cover all the different operational aspects of an educational entity like a school. This includes the following:

attendance
Students Result Management & Transcript Generating
parental access to the progress of their students studying in that school
emergency information pertaining to students
scores of tests
Easy accounting system
The benefit of these products for the smaller schools

A number of the school information management systems that you see these days come loaded with features.

However, this does not necessarily mean that all schools would like them or that they would be a natural fit for all the schools out there. In fact, it has been seen that the bigger schools are averse to using them since they already have people who have the time to maintain all the records, statistics, and data that we have talked about just now. The smaller schools happen to be the biggest users of these software products. They may not necessarily always need all the features that are there in these programs.

As such they would be more comfortable with working with the scaled down versions of these systems. This way they would also be able to save time with the important task of student management. There would be no need to create a program from scratch that could easily overwhelm the way that they work. No matter what it is, there is always a school information management system out there that is sure to suit the needs of a school.

The importance of online grade book

As a feature, the online grade book is one of the best aspects of these systems.

Thanks to this feature teachers are able to grade the students from their home and as a result of that schools are able to print them out easily enough. This also reduces the need for the teachers to fill out grade cards manually and hand them over to the students – a process that can be time-consuming apart from being tedious to the hilt. It is expected that in the foreseeable future these systems would be integral parts of the schools all around.

Other beneficial features of these systems

Yet another important name in this regard would be the attendance tracking feature.

This is one feature that is sure to make life a whole lot better for the teachers and the parents. There is a major benefit of taking attendance online. It allows people such as the building secretaries to see who has taken attendance during the morning hours and who has not. It is not as if this is meant only for students. Even teachers can be reminded that they need to take attendance. All this helps the school perform tasks in a much more efficient manner. It is also possible to keep track of things such as absences that may not be excused as per the school’s rules.

Explore School Software Features

By Chris David