The Ministry of Education (MOEYI) announced its partnership with MySchool Jamaica Solutions Ltd on Friday (Dec 6), to roll out a new state of the art nationalised School Management Software (SMS).

The software will be made available to schools for free beginning with the upcoming January 2020 semester.

“Less than 20% of schools in Jamaica have a School Management Software. Since getting wind of the impending announcement some two weeks ago, over 300 schools have called and signed up to date,” explained MySchool’s Chairman Dr David McBean.

MySchool Jamaica is a powerful, easy to use School Management Software (SMS) that allows principals and teachers to use their mobile phones, tablets or device of choice to input specific school data such as student attendance, medical, payment and disciplinary records, tests, homework and exam grades to name a few.

The data can later be retrieved and manipulated into several formats (tables, graphs, etc.) that can then produce on-demand, analytical, comparative and or other forms of controlled data results, allowing for principals to make more data-driven decisions.

“A principal can now, for example, pull up a report that shows all children in a school scoring below 50% in math or bring up the disciplinary record for a specific student over the last two years, compare the average overall grade of boys versus girls in 9thgrade or have the school nurse check to see that her student patient isn’t allergic to certain drugs,” said Dr McBean.

He added that “simple queries that once took hours or even days, can now be generated in seconds.”

Though the SMS has been around since 2004 and currently operates in 125 schools as the most widely distributed SMS in Jamaica, the SMS was primarily server-based and therefore limited.

In November 2018, the software was acquired by a Kimani Robinson led technology investment company. Mr Robinson along with new MySchool Chairman Dr David McBean, author and original owner of the software Gary Walker, Danish SMS expert Mrs Pia Bramwell and team, rewrote a new and improved cloud-based MySchool Jamaica software, using the SMS’s original architecture as the backbone.

The software which was already loaded now has even more features as well as a more modern user-friendly interface.

“Over one million-plus parents for the first time in Jamaica will have real-time access to their children’s entire academic profile. Besides being alerted on their phones to teacher-initiated chats, or alerted if their child is absent or in need of medical attention, parents will now be able to view their children’s entire academic activities and performance, from current and past grades, attendance records, homework and their due dates, to study syllabuses, disciplinary records, test scores just to name a few,” stated company COO Pia Bramwell.

“This agreement catapults Jamaica as a regional leader in the transformation of education through technology. The MySchool SMS once fully implemented will communicate daily to an estimated 600,000 students, 25,000 teachers and produce viewing access for 1 million-plus parents”

The SMS does not require real-time internet access and so if a school does not have Wi-Fi in their classrooms, the teacher simply enters the information in his or her device of choice and the app will sync the next time it comes within Wi-Fi range.