Multilingual Video Messaging Communication System for Parents Now Available with Parent-Update

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Parent Involvement

(PRWEB) August 31, 2010

The Parent-Update System has introduced an exciting new feature in its student communication system that gives parents information about their children’s school performance in a video format that’s easy to understand, regardless of language or technology skills.

The Parent-Update System tracks parent usage and automatically sends them follow-up notices. The system contains tracking and analytic tools that identify parents for more follow up or recognition. The Parent-Update System can significantly reduce the administrative cost of responding to parent inquires, especially from non-English speaking parents.

Effective parent communication and involvement is often difficult but always crucial to academic success. The patent-pending process used by the Parent-Update System allows schools to maximize parent involvement for all enrollment demographics. The Parent-Update System qualifies for Title 1 Parent Involvement funding and accommodates corporate sponsorship.

Parent-Update creates messages summarizing attendance, grades and discipline activity for a week. General messages and sponsor messages can also be created. The communication system makes the messages available to parents on the Internet or phone when they enter a password and user ID. Parents using the phone hear a clear, concise message, in a conversational format, and in their preferred language. Parent-Update can accommodate any language, even those languages where text-to-speech conversion, in the correct dialect, is very difficult (i.e. Hmong, Haitian Creole Somali, and Vietnamese).

Parents using the Internet watch a video of an avatar speaking the message, in the preferred language. The message text is displayed in a bubble above the avatar for parents who may be hearing impaired. No screen changing, list selection or other navigation or maneuvering is required.

School administrators realize that making information available is often not enough to get parents effectively involved. Many administrators are frustrated because they cannot tell how often parents are logging on to get the information. Since students can often intercept information delivered by outbound systems and regular mail, administrators cannot be sure parents actually got the message.

Parent-Update archives the attendance, grade and discipline data. This data is cross-referenced with the usage tracking data. Parent-Update can tell whether the parent retrieved each message and produce reports with the details of all messages for the current period. The report can indicate which messages were retrieved or not. Administrators can mail reports to parents or review reports during parent-teacher conferences. The Parent-Update System allows administrators to query the data and get lists based on user-defined parameters. Administrators can get lists, for example, of students who have absences reported in 10 of the last 20 weeks for which parents have retrieved less than 50 percent of messages. The video messages for the week ending Friday will be available to parents Saturday morning. Administrators can choose options that will automatically e-mail parents who have not logged in by Wednesday. The e-mail will contain a reminder and a link to the video message.

The U.S. Department of Education, Harvard University and other organizations have analyzed the relationship between parent involvement and student achievement. The conclusions are consistent. Parent involvement plays a significant role in student achievement. Parents need updated information to be an effective partner in their child's academic development. Often, cultural, language, technology and time issues are barriers to working parents getting the information they need. The communication system eliminates the cultural and language barriers by presenting the information in the parent's preferred language and eliminates the need for technical skills by presenting the information in a conversation format and in a video for Internet users. Parents can retrieve the information any time of day or day of the week by Internet or phone. Phone access is limited to once a week.

The Parent-Update system is affordable. Parent involvement funds and/or business sponsorship can cover the cost or significantly reduce the cost. Please call 800-908-9759 for additional information and to get an online demonstration of the many benefits and features.

Student Information System companies interested in integrating the Parent-Update System with their products should also call.

Corporate public relations departments or public relations companies interested in having messages presented to thousands of parents weekly, please call to discuss sponsorship.

For more information on the communication system, parents and other interested individuals can also visit http://parent-update.com.

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