‘Group chats are chaotic’: why some Chennai parents want the app their child’s old school had

“School group chats are chaotic, with several unwanted messages,” says Beena, a Chennai parent whose son studied at Chennai Public School until Class 10. There, a parents’ dashboard once gave her one-on-one information and let her pose queries through a portal. His current school offers no such platform, she said, and “they are missing out.”

Her frustration points to a wider shift already under way elsewhere in the city. Several Chennai schools are adopting mobile or web-based AI-powered enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools such as My Classboard and Neverskip, charging schools on a per-student basis to inform parents about homework, fees and transport, and to create a shared communication space with teachers.

At Vellammal Bodhi Campus, parent R Vidya no longer waits for her Class IX son to report his own test results. An app provided by the school notifies her directly, with an assessment of his strong and weak points and subject-wise insights. “My son can also take tests on the app, designed by the school themselves. Apart from the results of tests and internal assessments, the school uploads report cards and attendance details, to ensure transparency,” she said.

The technology reaches into grading too. Answer keys are fed into the system and answer sheets are analysed, offering insights into language through comparison. “It involves some work from the backend too on the teachers’ side. But the platforms are evolving. Once they notice a pattern, they automatically provide analysis without referring to answer sheets,” said a teacher at a prominent IB school on the OMR.

Educationists say the pandemic accelerated this shift by first forcing schools into digital teaching. “Today, ERPs have become vital to run a school, especially if the strength is high,” said Prem Shankar, chairman, Holy Sai Group of Institutions.

For parents like Beena, the unevenness is the sticking point: while some schools now run structured, AI-backed dashboards, others still rely on the same unwieldy group chats families have used for years.

[Wikimedia Commons/by McKay Savage]