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On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, Rob Beard wrote:
Gordon Henderson wrote:That would be a really good idea, I was thinking "I wish the school had some sort of automated phone line which parents could call", in my case a few kids were saying the school was closed but I ended up taking the kids in anyway to make sure for myself (it's only a 10 minute walk anyway). If there was a number parents could call though to check things like school closures that would be ideal, especially considering I didn't hear about the school being kept open on the radio (one or two schools still open were mentioned on Radio Devon) and not everyone has access to the internet/e-mail/Facebook/Twitter, but most will probably be able to call a phone number.My local school/client (Steiner in Dartington) doesn't go back until Monday, but they're already setting up staff conferences and answering machine messages just in-case...An intersting idea I had last year was to setup a service to schools, etc. which would give them a self-funded messaging service - a new number for each school which parents could call to get status, etc. initially aimed at the swine flu thing, but could have been used for this too - however the few schools I asked for opinions of weren't really intersted at the time, so I never developed it.Gordon
It's not that hard - I offered them a paid-for service using standard geographic numbers, or for free (to the school) using a fixed-fee type number to the caller - e.g. one of the 5p 0844 numbers, but got a rather minimal response to it.
Unfortunately the school web site doesn't cater for things like what happened today although I do see they have created a What's New section, with the last entry being 11th December 2009.
it's not hard to keep a website updated, but I wonder how many are tied into some IT project run by some quango or other...
But dealing with schools - it's like wading through cold treacle - cf. discussions we had here a few months back regarding servers, etc. so on the whole, probably more bother than it's worth...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html