It’s been a really exciting year at Firefly, with the acquisition of Epraise, the launch of Firefly on Teams and the continued development of the Parent Portal. The product and technology teams are constantly striving to provide the most innovative and impactful experience for our customers and we wanted to introduce some of the recent improvements we’ve been working on.
Mobile app updates
Over the coming weeks and months, a new visual style will be brought to the parent app, providing a more exciting and intuitive experience. Looking further ahead, this new visual style will be rolled out to our updated student and teacher mobile apps.
We’re also introducing more features into a native mobile experience. Parents will now be able to receive far more of the information they need within the mobile app in a smoother, faster experience (rather than being directed to the web app). This will include timetables to help parents quickly check where their child is or needs to be.
The Parent Portal experience
Following improvements to the parent mobile app, we’ll be looking to release some significant updates to our parent portal web app, to provide parents with a more modern and harmonised experience. This is a long term project, with lots to look forward to throughout 2022.
We’ve also just released some improvements to the way that documents (such as academic reports, medical notes, SEN documentation, for example) can be shared, using the SchoolPost technology. When documents are shared via a publication, they will be made available within the student profile pages, making it really easy to find documentation about a student.
Feature requests
We’ve been working really hard on some of your feature requests over the past few months and have released 42 improvements in recent months. Some highlights include rotating PDFs and images, scrollbar improvements in the markbook, login page tweaks and better student response management.
Epraise updates
The Epraise tech team has been hard at work with a number of big improvements to this platform. This includes a number of updates to student indicators, allowing enhanced SEN, medical, ethnicity, nationality and custom indicators. Points comments and subcategories are now options available within the platform. Finally, there’s been a number of improvements to the parents’ evening, messenger, classnotes and writeback features.
Looking into the future
Looking to 2022, we have a number of exciting new product updates on the horizon. One of our biggest goals will be to harmonise the experience across all Firefly products, including bringing some of the Epraise technology into the Firefly core product offering. We’ll continue to focus both on parental engagement in our Parent Portal, and our Teaching and Learning experience in the core Firefly platform.
We know Schools need to engage their whole community if they want to help every child have the best learning outcomes. We’re excited that you’ve joined us on our journey towards the vision of unifying the school experience.