Competitive Analysis

After shifting our focus to communication between teachers and parents, we started to look into current communication tools for school and parents out there. We try to learn from the strengths and drawbacks of current products/services. Also we want to make sure our service can offer a different experience.

Class Dojo

Class Dojo aims to create better classroom communities by connecting teachers with students and parents.

It’s special as it considers how to help kids have a voice in the communication, which is also helping the parents and teachers understand the kids better. But still there’s no communication designed for asthma or health.

Remind

Remind is a communication app that supports real-time messaging for school, group, or just a single person. This apps pay attention to tracking as parents can see who’s read their messages and who’s missing out.

Although it tries to facilitate faster communication, there’s still no plan for emergency communication. Also, there’s no talks and meetings specifically for asthma or even health, which is still leaving asthma out of the conversation.

Bloomz

Supports daily communication using direct messages and photos. Strong at supporting behavior tracking.

Sapphire

Sapphire is a single web-based software system connecting administrators, teachers, students and parents. This software helps stakeholders capture and manage student data, generate compliant state reports and gain insight into school and district performance. This system is used among Pennsylvania public schools.

It has School Nurse Health System as part of the whole information system. But within the health management, there’s no asthma topics raised for talks or communication.

From the competitive analysis we knew that there are a lot of communication tools out there. There’s even mature system like Sapphire that is widely used by schools. However, none of them takes asthma management into consideration. But asthma management and communication can be hard for parents especially those whose kids newly get diagnosed.

Considering all the facts, we reframed our service to a plugin which can be integrated into systems that schools are currently using. This will make our service easier to be used in schools as it won’t affect schools current management system. It also helps us narrow down our design scope to focus on only asthma rather than covering all aspects of school communication.