Eureka! Institutional Repository

Effective communication between the school unit and family is an important factor in educational goals achieving. Inhomogeneity, observed in the means of communication used by teachers, and student’s age affect the quality of information, a problem which is more intense in primary education. In addition, the use of obsolete communication means by school units leads to a waste of resources (human and material). In Greece there is no official communication system between school and family. MySchool the integrated information system, used by all educational units, is limited to unilateral communication from school to parents focused exclusively on grades and absences. Existing applications, that have been developed mainly at a research level, cover a few aspects of this communication while the commercial ones offer limited communication possibilities. The primary purpose of this study was to design an application aiming to facilitate communication between primary education school, parents and students, regarding the daily operation of the classroom. Daily tasks and assignments, exams planning, student assessment, classroom announcements, event information, meetings planning and educational visits registration were included. The Unified Model Language was used to visualize the required functions. The 3-tier design was selected including MySQL database management system, PHP programming language and Apache web server regarding the data, the application and the presentation tier respectively. A use case diagram was created to describe the relationship between ‘mySchool’ and the suggested communication system and a second one to depict the functions and users of the new system. Class and activity diagrams were created for every function. The main tables of the database were created and the main pages of the user interface were designed. In summary, a school - family communication system was designed that in case of implementation will cover the communication needs of the classroom.