A few days ago, I had a conversation with my grandfather-in-law about my blog topic for this week.
"What's it's supposed to be about?" he asked.
"Mobile technology," I replied.
"Well," he said, "if I was going to write about mobile technology, I guess I would start out discussing the wheel."
Isn't it interesting how the words we use and the meanings we ascribe to them change over time? The concept of mobile technology means something quite different today than it did just a few decades ago.
Over the past year I have had the opportunity to participate in strategic planning in the school district where I manage communication and public relations. It has been so interesting during this period to see what a tremendous emphasis our community has placed not only on communication, but on the avenues through which we communicate. One of the specific action steps developed by those who participated in the planning was quite direct: develop a mobile app.
The Web seems to have gone through a cycle over its brief life, starting primarily with text-only websites, growing to include richer and more robust content, and now moving back toward content that easily fits on a small screen. Research indicates that American adults spend more than half of their time interacting with digital media via a mobile device (source). Google now reports that an overwhelming majority of its searches are taking place on mobile devices (source). It only makes sense, then, that parents would want the same ease of access from their child's school as they already have with other essential services like search, navigation, and news.
In a major way, the effort we have undertaken to design a mobile app for our school district is simply a process of consolidating many disparate services into a single hub. The best mobile apps always seem to have a way of doing that. The most popular iOS mobile app of all time, Facebook (source) has managed over the course of time to integrate nearly every feature of its website — status updates, photos, video, location-based data, groups, and search — so well into its app that nearly half of its users only access the service through a mobile device (source). This proliferation of mobile apps and the popularity of mobile platforms like Apple's iOS have led some commentators to wonder out loud if Apple would be better served combining its mobile operating system with its venerable desktop platform, OS X; CEO Tim Cook recently announced this was not in Apple's plans (source) but there will surely be many in the years to come who continue to clamor for a great mobile/desktop singularity.
To have success in the mobile space, however, we must do more than just bring together services onto a mobile-optimized screen. All of us must commit ourselves to communicate in a mobile-optimized manner. Good execution in the mobile space must focus on more than design; companies and agencies must give end users a reason to download their apps in the first place and then ensure that users continue to reserve real estate on their mobile screens for these apps over time. It is — to the detriment of many app developers — incredibly easy to delete an app and all traces of its existence on an end user's device. We must continually provide content through the app that keeps our users from doing just that.
What I have found, in practice, is that mobile-optimized communication most often involves more visual content than text-based content. I discovered a perfect example of this just a few weeks ago when I recorded and posted a video online of a student who returned to one of our elementary schools after being out for months with an illness:
This video, in case you can't see it, is just sixty seconds long. There's barely any editing done at all; it's just a kid getting out of a car and hugging and high-fiving his friends. But in less than 24 hours, that sixty-second video was viewed more than twenty thousand times and "liked" by more than a thousand people. I received a note a few days later from the mother of the child at the center of the video: "[During a checkup] his nurse came into the room and said, 'You sound familiar.' Then it came to her that she had seen his return to school video. She said she just sat down and cried. I have no idea who she is."
I could have easily written a press release or an article about that student instead of making a video. But would it have had the same impact? Would that child's nurse, who by the very nature of her job does not have the time or the access to a desktop computer to view that video, have ever known about his story and been moved to tears if we had not created this video and shared it through a mobile platform? No way.
When I am finished working with our team on the development of our mobile app in a few short weeks, it will include streams of news and rich content from each of our schools, an aggregated social media feed that pulls in school-specific posts, push notifications for emergencies or reminders, school calendars and GPS-enabled maps to each of our campuses. I am thrilled about the possibilities for us in this space.
But perhaps more exciting is what a mobile app means for the future of two-way communication in our school system. Government organizations are notoriously challenged in this space, and many local agencies and public school systems struggle with the perception that they are not "open" or "transparent" enough because there are no easy ways to communicate with those in power. This is an area where we hope to become leaders by way of our mobile app. Ours will feature in-app communication with school and district administrators that allows the sharing of messages, photos and other information instantly. The app will include a built-in translation tool, allowing any of the content within the app to be translated into sixty different languages with the tap of a button — a wonderful development for families who might not speak English as their primary language. We are also building in a bullying reporting "tip line" within the app, through which instances of bullying, harassment and student endangerment can be shared — anonymously — with school leaders. We are excited for what this means for our students, the atmosphere of our schools, and the bridges this has the potential to build with our community and new families in the years ahead.
I think it is great that the school system you work for is developing an app that will allow for two way communication between parents and the system. As a parent, I think it is important to have a way to quickly and effectively communicate with the people in charge of helping my developing child. By creating a medium, a dialogue can be ongoing and natural. Concerns of parents, administration, and faculty can be voiced in a productive way, through a useful channel.
ReplyDeleteYoung children have neither the capacity nor the responsibility to fully communicate messages between grown-ups. Some ideas are simply too big, or too mature, to be handled by kids in grade school. For instance, an app would be useful in the event of severe weather or if there were an especially contagious outbreak of some type of sickness.
An app is also a terrific way to encourage the “mobile, too,” attitude in your school system. Embracing an emerging medium is a fine way to show forward-thinking within your organization and to say, “We aren't afraid of tomorrow. We are already there.” Using new tools in exciting and groundbreaking ways to shape and prepare young minds of today for the challenges of tomorrow is the entire point of education, and apps are still finding their niche in the workplace. Education could well prove to benefit the most from an app that grows the ability to communicate in both directions, as it ensures that messages are received by all parties.
Communication is the missing factor in very many situations in life that don't go according to plan, and finding any way to maximize communication is a step in the right direction. Not only where children are concerned of course, but in that area in particular, as we prepare them for the future.