St Andrew's Catholic College, is a co-educational P-12 college located in Redlynch Valley in Cairns, Australia. The College encompasses strong values and offers its students extensive curriculum options, exceptional facilities, and outstanding academic results.
In this case study, we chat with St Andrew's Support ICT Officer, Travis Fuller, about how a Digistorm school app (known as fondly as the ‘AndIE app’ to the College) has fostered a greater connection with parents. After the first meeting at a conference in 2019, Travis partnered with our team to achieve the College’s communication goals — and he says that it has been “100 times better than it used to be.”
All about the AndIE app
The AndIE app is the mobile version of our AndIE platform which stands for the St Andrew's Innovative Environment. The app is focused on our parent audience — they use it to get their news, notifications from our school calendar and they can even look at their child's timetable which helps them make appointments outside of school if they have to.
Travis says his team has noticed that students also use the app to keep up with assessments and notifications, and that staff is loving it as well.
An improvement in school communication
Since introducing the AndIE app, Travis says the team has noticed a significant improvement in communication.
In the past, parents would get flooded with emails and information, but now it’s all in one place and they know where to look for it. We’re still working on refining it, but it’s definitely 100 times better than what it used to be.
School community app adoption
Travis says community adoption of the AndIE app was quick due to the school's marketing roll-out plan.
"We launched both the AndIE platform and the AndIE app at the same time, so it was one change instead of two changes. This was a deliberate choice, we were very aware of the change fatigue with families around technology.
A lot of the marketing we did was fridge magnets with a QR code on the back. This meant that parents could scan the QR code and instantly download the AndIE app. We also did a lot of print outs and mailed them out to all of our families as well.
The Digistorm team is a great bunch of people, they understand how schools work and bend over backwards to help schools out.