How many activities take place every week in your school? Sports fixtures, music lessons, clubs, meetings, staff training, and even more? There can be a lot going on in a busy school!
It can be a challenge for students, staff and parents to keep up with extracurricular activities and it can be even more difficult for admins to keep everyone up to date. Printed displays are time consuming to update regularly and letters to parents don’t always make it home.
So what’s the solution? Many schools have decided to go digital with their calendars, making them simpler to update and easier to keep everyone in the loop. There are many solutions on offer, though not all of them are designed for education. This means that sharing and permissions may not be customisable to different groups of people, or viewers have to wade through events that aren’t relevant to them to find what they need.
Centralised calendars with SOCS
The great news is that SOCS Calendar was built specifically for education, offering seamless calendar management to keep schools and parents in sync.
When you’re planning your events, staff can see proposed dates, deal with clashes, and easily approve before publishing. There’s also an option to roll over your key fixtures at the end of the school year.
Once your events are live, you can share a link with students and parents who can easily view what’s coming up on their own device with daily, weekly and monthly views. They can also filter by event type, so that rugby players see upcoming matches while artists know when they should be in the studio. And if you do need to print a copy to send home? That’s easy too.
SOCS also offers a Big Screen option for large screen displays in sports halls, corridors and reception areas. It includes features such as the upcoming sports programme, today’s teams and latest results and news and is designed to be viewed on an internet browser in full screen mode or a TV or monitor with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels.
Boost the reach of your SOCS calendars with TrilbyTV
When paired with TrilbyTV on digital signage, the SOCS Calendar module becomes an even more powerful channel for communication. TrilbyTV’s Calendar feature lets you add your own calendar feed with an ICS link so that you can display upcoming events around the school.
With the help of our Categories feature, you can make sure relevant calendars are shown in the right place. For example, staff want to see upcoming training, meetings and social events in the staffroom, whereas you could display sports fixtures in the PE building, or trips and after school activities in reception for parents.
Diane Boys, IT Systems and Support Manager at Merchiston Castle School says,
“Now that we have TrilbyTV digital signage in the School, we are able to display the School online calendar (produced via SOCS) on our digital staff noticeboard, helping our staff to be more aware of activities taking place and deadlines coming up, and generally improving communication across the School”.
Book a TrilbyTV Demo
Book free DemoBetter still, the TrilbyTV Calendar feature automatically transforms your calendar into a beautiful, easy-to-read format so that your community can easily engage with your events. You can change the colours to match your branding, pick a font size, and choose between showing a single day or the full week ahead.
If you want to display your SOCS Big Screen content, you can add the URL to TrilbyTV’s Web Content feature which allows you to display the more detailed Big Screen information through your digital signage.
Your calendars in TrilbyTV will automatically update as you add new events in SOCS. If you cancel an upcoming event, it will display as cancelled on your digital signage and will even show a cancellation reason if you added it in SOCS.
Francis Taylor, Assistant Head, Admissions and External Relations at St John’s College, Cardiff has found the TrilbyTV and SOCS integration easy to use and an important piece of their communication strategy. Francis explains,
“TrilbyTV digital signage has been an integral part of our internal communications at St John’s College in recent years. We recently invested in the SOCS core package and have been impressed with how easily we have integrated its calendar into our TrilbyTV platform. On our pupil-facing displays, we show daily and weekly events; for staff, all the key information they need on a daily basis such as tracking and report deadlines. In all, TrilbyTV and SOCS are a match made in digital signage heaven!”
Keeping the whole school community in the loop
When you combine the power of SOCS Calendar with TrilbyTV, you’ll be able to keep students, parents and staff up-to-date wherever they are. Outside school they can easily access their SOCS Calendar on a computer or mobile device, reminding them to bring in their PE kit or guitar. In school they’ll see upcoming events on signage, showing them what’s on later, which is even more important in schools where mobile devices are not allowed.
To see TrilbyTV for yourself and find out more about our digital signage platform made for education, you can book a demo or sign up for a fully functional 30 day free trial.
You can also get a guided tour of SOCS to see how it can transform managing your full co-curricular programme and calendar. Click here to book a SOCS demo.