The development of a digital application to promote parents’ involvement in character education at primary schools

This paper documents the preliminary development procedure of a digital application named Parents UP to promote parents’ involvement in their children character education at primary schools in Indonesia. Parents UP was developed as an android-based system interface and was proposed to enable parents maintain mutual engagement with school administrator, teacher and pedagogy team in nurturing and monitoring the good characters of the children. Despite the positive feedback from the school head-teachers, administrators, teachers and parents towards the incorporation of Parents UP technology in their children character education at school, some critical issues were highlighted during the pilot project, such as different focus of character education at the participating schools, diversity in parents’ and students’ economy and social status, and the influence of parents’ culture and religion to the activity modules in the application. In reference to the findings, implications of the study to further development of Parents UP are offered. Keywords: digital application, parents’ involvement, character education, primary school educatio