The digital age and the pandemic forced schools to intensify the updating of their management methods, contents, and tools to meet the needs of students and the community. New subjects and extracurricular activities have been emerging in recent years, such as robotics, astronomy, audiovisual editing, environmental education, numerous languages, entrepreneurship, gastronomy, among others.

The Challenge

Nevertheless, the evolution process is not equal for all schools in the world, for clear reasons:
1 – They have different budget sources and annual income levels;
2 – Many of them are still learning the best way to implement changes;
3 – Some of them depend on the government to make decisions and acquisitions to make improvements, so this process happens slower.

One Smart Way to The Solution

Before you start putting new actions into practice, think of organizing your school’s general management. Up to these days, just like many companies, there are schools managing their whole business with isolated documents in separate departments, with no integration, no methodology and no safety.

If your school needs to update its management methods, so all departments communicate with each other, becoming able to implement innovations, you need a smart project management tool, just like innovative schools use. Wondering about the costs? Well, first, you can try the GitScrum tool for free, and use many functionalities this way. Second, when you feel the need to unlock unlimited benefits, you will see it is pretty cost-effective, and it’s what the market calls “smart money”, because it pays you back with high results. With GitScrum, you will:

1. Organize School Departments / Areas in Workspaces

Organize your whole management by creating Workspaces. These are directories where you will place projects. You will create Workspaces, sorting them by the school department, working unit, or as you find most appropriate. For example:

After you organize your teams, they will be able to create their projects and manage their activities with GitScrum Board. This feature brings a modern version of Kanban boards, a visual productivity model consolidated worldwide that helps thousands of businesses every day. Each project will have its main GitScrum Board, so coordinators, school employees and teachers will be able to self-organize and become more responsive, updating their tasks so you can check all their accomplishments.

You can use pre-made free templates to customize your teams’ workflow, with distinct options for each projects, and can create your own templates according to your needs. The project managers will be able to create and assign tasks, guide assignees with task descriptions adding rich content, like reference files, images, text and videos. Collaborators will be able to make comments and suggestions on each other’s tasks, making projects much more interactive.

2. Provide Teachers a Slick Tool to Create Interactive Projects for Students

Once you provide teachers with a tool for them to create projects and collaborate with colleagues and students, they will be free to innovate and deliver much more valuable work. They have the possibility to invite students into the projects, or share projects with them, using a shareable link, to send information boards and content in a much more interactive format than the conventional ones.

Teachers can create a project together with the classroom (a sample business, company, city or science project, for instance), using the GitScrum Board, and manage it during several lessons, exchanging ideas with students on how to improve it. The intention is to offer practical experiences and learning to students. They can also write reports on their experiences.

3. Have a Collaborative Platform to Communicate with Parents and Community

GitScrum offers you the possibility to establish close contact with all your stakeholders, inviting them to participate in the projects and interact with the subjects that concern them. Keep an open channel for parents to see the projects that their kids are creating with teachers, so they can interact together, with encouragement, and better understand your work.

4. Elaborate Didactical Rich Content

Use Gitscrum Mind Mapping as a powerful complementary tool to create didactical graphs. They can support teachers to explain many subjects, help students to understand and memorize topics. It makes the complex turn simple, working just like our mind does, in an intuitive way.

5. Encourage Teachers & Students to Create and Publish Educational Internal Content

Present teachers and students the possibility to create and publish useful content in internal pages with GitScrum Wiki. This is a feature that allows them to collaborate, edit, publish and share several possibilities, like:

• Tips on how to study better at home;
• The school or their classroom newsletter;
• Pages with articles and compositions;
• Reports on their personal learnings;
• Notes on their activities and events, with pictures and embedded videos;
• Event invitations and hotsites;
• Present the teachers’ biography and school staff, so parents know them better;
• Present a school brochure / institutional information;
• Guidelines for students and parents;
• Social balance sheet;
• Publicize the school’s campaigns;
• Environmental educative texts;
• Anti-bullying campaign;
• Tips on safety for families (online/offline);
• Health and family issues.

6. Use Gamification to Stimulate Education and Good Work

Bring some fun, meritocracy and encouragement to your work and study environment. With GitScrum Rock Star Team, you can create gamification projects and reward your best-performing employees, teachers and students. Gamification is a growing trend worldwide, and it can be applied and balanced in determined profiles of student groups who will love to surpass their own limits.

How is it possible? The project coordinator must create tasks and standardize their value, according to their complexity. The more participants achieve tasks, the more points they will get. During the gamification process, the teacher or project leader must encourage them, with verbal positive comments and attention to issues that must be improved. In the end, they will be ranked and rewarded as a recognition of their efforts.

7. Skyrocket your Team’s Productivity with Sprints

Do you sometimes have the feeling that of your school’s objectives could be achieved much faster? Train your team to work with GitScrum Sprints – time-boxed sessions they can associate with weekly, fortnight or monthly goals.

As soon as the project leader includes the tasks into it, GitScrum will show you a burndown chart. With this graphic resource, you can monitor the daily progress of each team member, comparing the ideal performance to the actual one. This helps increase the team time awareness, sense of commitment, and team collaboration towards common goals.

8. Create Public Projects to Promote the School Fairs and Campaigns

Do you know those amazing projects your groups of students create at the yearly science fair, robotics or art lab, environmental and social campaigns? You can showcase them to your community, and even to the whole world by creating public projects with GitScrum.

In your GitScrum project management tool, projects can be private (shared within a limited group of people), or public, shared worldwide on the web. This can be used to share useful information with other schools and promote your school as a pioneer in some areas.

Public projects can be accessed by a www address, or shared with an URL link by email and social media to all your mailing lists.

9. Manage the School’s Calendar

Lean on the interactive GitScrum Gantt Charts to get your educational projects big picture, all on one screen. Your teams can also use it to monitor their project schedules, using its colored bars to check for their next appointments and duties at any time, and make adjustments quickly.

10. Promote Discussions Among the Community

GitScrum offers you a Discussions feature, so your staff, coordinators, and students can discuss relevant themes.

11. Manage Customer Requests’ Priorities to Deliver Value Constantly

As any big company, schools sometimes struggle with a high volume of requests and high expectations coming from parents. There are so many parents asking for improvements, and it’s hard to answer to all of them. Do you know there is a tool to organize these requests? It was created in the software industry, but nowadays it’s largely used by many markets. It’s called GitScrum User Stories. These are short reports that summarize your clients’, customers’ (parents’), end-users (students’) and workers’ (teachers’) needs.

In order to organize them, you will lean on GitScrum User Stories Priority templates. That means you will standardize and define an importance / urgency order to forward them to the right department.

It’s important to be transparent to all stakeholders and clients about how the school works on this process, to make the maximum efforts to implement the improvements that fit the students’ needs, according to requests and the school’s principles.

12. Have Your Custom Brand Project Management Tool

Would you like your school to have your own project management tool, where you could relate to parents, teachers and students? Today, you don’t need to hire its development from scratch. With GitScrum White Label, you can use all the project management features and customize your tool, replacing GitScrum logo by your own. Use your own domain address and apply your subdomains and email address. That will lift your school brand to another level!