SchoolCal’s mission, rebrand, and future

tl;dr

We’re doubling down on our goal to build valuable software that helps you coordinate staff, students, and spaces. We have a new brand that visually reinforces what we do (connecting disparate sources of data together) and how we feel about it (energetic and optimistic). We “moved” from schoolcal.co to schoolcal.com. And we have plans for new features and products.

Doubling down on our goal

School operations are complex. K-12 schools face unique challenges other organizations don’t. Teachers operate on one schedule, administrators another. There’s special days to contend with. And different schedules for teachers, students, events, and rooms. Your academic schedules are defined in your SIS, but your users live in their calendar apps.

But when users can’t see each other’s schedules, it makes coordinating even more difficult. Teachers can’t easily see their schedules or sit in on other classes. Students can’t take ownership of their schedules or proactively book time to get help. Administrators spend hours juggling long email threads, polls, and manual workarounds.

3 years ago, we started SchoolCal to solve that problem. We partnered with 11 founding schools (thank you!) to build a powerful, but easy-to-manage solution that lets you connect your sync event data from your SIS to staff and student calendars. It needed to give you control over what you sync, and who you sync it with. And most importantly, it should “just work”. No ongoing maintenance, steep learning curve, or expensive pricing.

Since then, we now work with hundreds of schools - both public and private - and seen first-hand all the ways that connecting calendars helped connect the school. Thousands of hours of time has been saved. Teachers observe each other's classes more often. Students are encouraged to take ownership of their schedule. Parents have more visibility into their student’s school life. Administrators can see staff’s schedules in real-time, and book meetings or rooms in seconds (instead of hours). Tech leaders have provided tools for their community to make operations easier.

Our goal is to build valuable software that helps you schedule and coordinate staff, students, and spaces. And today, we wanted to share a few ways we’re doubling down on that with a new brand, a new “home”, and new solutions.

New brand: sun rays + data rays

Our new brand is a visual representation of what we do, and how we feel about it.

Introducing our new brand

Syncing disparate data

Fundamentally, SchoolCal brings together multiple sources of disparate data and syncs it to a location that helps coordinate and connect your school. The sun rays double as “data rays”, all being brought together to a central location. This is core to what we do both now, and in the future.

Rising sun

But we wanted a brand that went beyond the technical idea of syncing. We love what we do, and who we do it for. And we wanted something that reflected that. The rising sun represents our optimism, energy, and excitement for our work and goal. It also feels like it matches with you, the people we get to work with. Each new day, you get up and educate another generation. And this requires energy, optimism, and excitement for the future.

So in the next event you attend, look for our “sun rays and data rays” and say “hi!”. And if you ask Aaron very nicely, you might just get a cool new hat or t-shirt.

New domain: find us at schoolcal.com

We’ve officially moved from schoolcal.co to schoolcal.com. The old app login and website will automatically redirect, so none of your links, bookmarks, or shortcuts will break. There also won’t be any interruption or changes in the syncing process.

This also means we have new email addresses. You can still email us at the old addresses (e.g. aaron@schoolcal.co), but you’ll see all new emails and replies from the new address (e.g. aaron@schoolcal.com).

New products: early plans & ideas

Our goal is to build valuable software that helps you schedule and coordinate staff, students, and spaces. Our first product did that by syncing SIS event data to staff and student calendars. We’ll continue to improve, simplify, and refine that as we have for the past few years.

But we’ve also identified other sources of “calendar chaos” your school faces, and have early plans for a new product or two that will help solve it. We hope to share more on that later, but if you’d like to get a first look and help shape it, you can reach out to aaron@schoolcal.com and we’ll share more details with you.

New school year

That’s it for our news. As we look to start the beginning of a new school year, we just wanted to say “thank you” for all your support these past few years. We’re more excited than ever about building solutions that “just work”, and bring loads of value to your school. And we wouldn’t be where we are without all of you.