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.
We spoke with St Andrew's Support ICT Officer Travis Fuller about how a Digistorm App (known 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 the school’s AndIE platform, which stands for St Andrew's Innovative Environment. The app is focused on its existing parent community, providing a platform for news, notifications, student timetables, and appointments. 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.
Improving school communication
Since introducing the AndIE app, Travis says the team has noticed a significant improvement in communication. Before the app, their communication was disorganised and chaotic. By providing a central hub for their communication, the whole process is now much simpler and more effective for the school and parents.
School community app adoption
Adopting any new technology can always be tricky, but thanks to the school’s marketing roll-out plan, Travis tells us the community were quick to download the AndIE app. Choosing to include marketing collateral like fridge magnets with a QR code for instant app downloads was a clever decision.
“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.”
