Push Notification Service for Enhancing Relation between Parents and Educational Institutions: A case Study on Egyptian Schools.

With the growing interest in utilizing mobilecommunications to enhance the interactions between differentpartners in educational institutions, particularly in schools.However, how communicating with parents via applicationswhile aren't actively running is quite a challenging demand. Onthe other hand, the addressed success of the Android supportingfeatures provided a good candidate to support applications withreal time information. Moreover the Android platformssupports efficiently customizable notifications, which allowapplications based on Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) tospecify the pushed events. In this paper we demonstrate andvalidate the adequacy of mobile services to enhance theinteraction between schools and parents based on efficient useof push notification service in both real time and criticalinformation. The paper presents a proposed notification system;MParent, that actively provide alerts and messaging betweenparents and schools. Also, an open approach was used todetermine the reaction of the parents depending on what theywant to be pushed to their phones .The proposed system, theMParent, was implemented, tested and validated. Evaluationand questionnaire results have proven how proposed systemsatisfy both parties; parents and school administrations