We have all been hearing the latest news of financial disasters, tightening budgets, and families that are keep a much closer eye on their spending.  The latest money news hits all of us.  And it hits your school. What the future holds is uncertain.

Will lower home pricess drive lower assessments and thus les money from bond levies, if they pass as people think more about where their money is going?  It’s hard to say, but we have solutions that inform, update, and build your school community, even during the potentially tough times ahead.

Tandem for Schools is a comprehensive calendar tool for schools and districts that offers the following benefits:

• Very simple event and calendar management with less paper.
• Easy, and FREE, school master calendar creation with flexible electronic distribution options.
• Registered users (parents, students, etc.) get updates when events get changed or cancelled, potentially saving wasted trips and gas.
• Very low cost system that will cost no more than $499 per school.  No per user license costs.
• Low cost of ownership.  We host Tandem on our servers and maintain all the technicalities.  All you do is get started entering and managing your events.
• No additional costly and complicated training necessary.

Tandem for Schools will save you:

• Time
• Paper
• Money
• Gas
• and Grief!

Check out Tandem for Schools today to see our easy, inexpensive and green solution that will help you make the most our of your school or district budget while strengthening your school community.  Get started with our FREE version, Tandem Basic, with absolutely no cost or obligation by clicking the button:

Or try a FREE, 30-day trial of our complete calendar system by clicking here…

Or fill out this demo request form to have one of our experts walk you through Tandem for Schools with a live web demo.

We call it Tandem Basic.  It’s the simplest way to build school and district master calendars.  Gone are the days of multi-step processes.

Tandem Basic allows you to enter all key dates using a web browser in minutes:

• First and last day of school.
• Holidays
• Early Dismissals
• Staff Days
• Etc.

Once all key dates are entered, Tandem Basic provides a collection of useful ways to distribute your yearly calendar:

• Print out attractive PDF’s to use as handouts or post on the web.
• Post an HTML calendar on your web site with ease
• Provide RSS feeds for your school community to subscribe to
• Provide links for users to sync this calendar with Outlook, Google Calendars, and iCal

And if there are changes?  Easy.  Just log in to the calendar and make changes in minutes.  The changes you make are immediately reflected in all electronic versions you have provided.

The best feature of Tandem Basic is that it is completely FREE.  You can get started now with easy yearly calendar creation.  Just click the big green button…

We are excited to announce the launch of our new and improved website.   Here’s what you can expect:

• All in the information  you need to choose and purchase Tandem for Schools
• More videos to clearly explain how Tandem can work for you
• Improved readability
• Cleaner design

Be sure to check out the site today.  Let us know how we can help you decide on Tandem for Schools as the most complete and easy way to manage your school calendars.

It’s already mid-summer and in no time, kids will be coming back to school. Events and activities will again fill the schedule.  Do the tools you currently have make it easy to manage your event and calendar planning?  If not, Tandem for Schools may be just what you are looking for.

Here are some clear benefits:

– Organize – Tandem will help you keep all of your activities and events straight from a central calendar using any web-browser.

– Communicate – Tandem will help your entire school community stay informed.  Parents that are registered users of the calendar can choose the events they want to keep update on.  If events change or get cancelled, they receive immediate notification.  No more onslaught of phone calls into your office when a game gets cancelled.

– Streamline – Because all your events get entered into one database, there is no more need to keep multiple calendars.  And when you add events, Tandem’s conflict checking features will give you the peace of mind that there won’t double-booking of facilities or events.

We’d like to help make your job easier.  Find out how by contacting us for a in-depth walk-through of Tandem for Schools.  One of our representatives will spend 15-20 minutes reviewing all the main features over the web with you.

Click here to scheule a demo now…

Hello all, my name is Darin and I’m a part of the Intand Sales Team.  Prior to joining Intand, I was on staff at the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA), also known as the governing body for high school sports and activities in Washington.  One of the major areas that the WIAA office emphasized was the member schools sending in their athletic schedules and scores.  Often this was a time-consuming task because most of that information had to be collected and organized by an already-busy athletic administrator or secretary.  This is where Tandem can help you.

With Tandem you can create “Schedules” that essentially search your database of information for any area you want.  You can search for groups, teams, facilities and schools in less than 15 seconds.

Plus the schedules automatically update themselves when you make a change or edit to your main Tandem calendar.  OK, so this is related to my WIAA story because, in less than 15 seconds, you can create your 2008 Varsity Volleyball schedule and export that data to a .CSV file (which is readable by Microsoft Excel).  Now all you have to do is email your 2008 Varsity Volleyball schedule to your state activities office.  It’s that quick.

And, what’s more, you can create an unlimited amount of schedules in your Tandem calendar.  So just imagine that you have all your sports teams schedules, band practice schedule and gymnasium schedule all ready at the click of a mouse!

Best of all, extensive technological knowledge is not required to use Tandem.  Our tool was created by school administrators and they know what it takes to make navigating the system a breeze.

For more quick tips and Tandem product information, let me or any of my co-workers know if we can be of more assistance.  You can reach us at 866-685-3449.   And be sure to check out our support area too.  You’ll find tutorials, videos and other posts there that you will find helpful.

Enjoy your summer!

In this day and age of environmental awareness, everyone is talking about small carbon footprints, recycling and sustainability.  Well, we’re no ones to leverage the cause du jour into a crass business purpose, but there are very real ways Tandem can impact the environment positively:

– Tandem may help you reduce significant paperwork in your calendar planning and approval process.  It’s all online, and event approvals using our system don’t require paper sign offs.  This may be of minimal impact in just one school.  But think of the implications if an entire district uses Tandem.

– Tandem may help save gas.  If parents are aware of canceled events via email, they can avoid unnecessary trips.

– Tandem may help reduce paper calendar handouts to students and staff.  Say the choir has a practice schedule filtered through Tandem.  Students can view this online and print a calendar out at their discretion.  And that’s just the choir.  Just think about how the athletic department could reduce their paper output by using Tandem.

These are just some basic ideas.  We want to help schools steward their resources more effectively, both financially and environmentally.  Tandem may just be part of the solution.

Do you have other ideas?  Feel free to post them here.

Jon Udell made some interesting points in his blog about the importance of calendars and data feeds. He call syndication of data feeds “transformative technology”. Syndication? Data feeds? Gobbelygook?

He is right. These two technologies are important, but what do they mean? Syndication allows internet users to grab information (usually in the form of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication) and consolidate it in one place rather than going to multiple web sites to gather their daily info dose.

Simply put, at many web sites, you can subscribe to a feed, and read all of your subscribed feeds from one place using a reader tool (Google Reader is a good and simple one). And Viola! Every time new posts are added, or information is updated, it shows up as new in your reader. Easy, and cool!

You will be interested to know that Tandem for Schools provides RSS feeds of calendar events. Users can filter events by group to track events and updates. So there is nothing for users to do except review their feeds on a regular basis. If events are updated in the system, everyone has the updates immediately, easing communication and office logistics.

So, the PDF you may be posting may be working for you for now. But what happens if the staff member that updates it is out? How do change requests get communicated? Tandem for Schools gets around all this. Your entire staff can be empowered to manage the calendar. And your parents and students will be drawn in to higher involvement. That’s the goal anyway.

Tandem for Schools can be a big help when school or district events get changed or canceled.  Parents can sign up to have updates sent to them via email (and through other means like SMS, etc. in the future).  So if they have kids in soccer, they can be notified if a game gets canceled due to weather.  No more taking 100’s of calls in your school office when there is a schedule change in question.  Once a staff member updates the calendar, everyone who has signed up for the updates knows about the change.  And you can breathe a sigh of relief.

A recent post at Weblogg-ed exposes a problem: technology for technology’s sake. It seems that a Alexandria, VA school spent $98 million on new facilities and tech, only to find that faculty morale was still low and cynicism ran high.

It’s a shame, because technology can empower everyone in the school ecosystem — from parents to students to faculty and staff. It’s clear that there are a lot of bloated technology solutions out there that give minimal empowerment for the costs incurred.

Some questions might be in order which may help determining if the tech you need is actually the tech that will help your school or district:

• Will this save you and other staff time?
• How long is the learning curve? Remember that most technology has two main competitors: pen/paper and the old way of doing things. If the learning curve is perceived to be higher than these two “competitors”, your cause is lost.
• Does the tech you are looking at implementing build your school community and drive higher involvement, or not?
• What is the total cost of ownership (TCOA)? What is the cost per student?
• How long does it take to implement the new tech, and once it is up and running, how long before it actually drives efficiency and community?

There are other criteria of course, but it seems that the above questions are forgotten rather quickly.

How many times have you scheduled something on your school calendar, only to find later that the facility or time you specified was double-booked?  This is a frustrating scenario, both for staff and outside users of your calendar.

Tandem for Schools overcomes this problem with built-in conflict checking.  When you enter an event, you’ll know right away if you are double-booking.  And your job will be easier because of it.