By Sean Cann & Maly Pena
Have you ever found yourself trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment and wondering when that field trip is scheduled so you don’t plan it on the same day? Or trying to respond to a friend of a friend who wants to know, “What is Montessori anyway? Is it worth it?” You know you can access the school calendar and an article you can share, but do you have time to gather all that information? What if there was one app for that?
Montessori.org—home of the Montessori Foundation, the International Montessori Council, and the Montessori Family Alliance— officially released The Montessori App on the iOS and Android app stores. This new app organizes all Montessori.org resources into one central spot. In addition to Montessori.org resources, this partnership also allows any Montessori school to have its own school-specific app within The Montessori App, making it a true one-stop-shop for any Montessori school’s community. Anyone can install this new app for free by searching for montessori.org on the app store.
The International Montessori Council’s new mobile app allows anyone in the Montessori community to easily access all of Montessori.org’s information in a user-friendly, personalized way. This new home for everything Montessori is helpful for school administrators, teachers, parents, and anyone else interested in learning more about what Montessori has to offer. Now, anyone can join the app to discover upcoming events and webcasts, receive personalized messages about things happening in the Montessori community, and much more.
“It will be a very easy way for interested parties to put Montessori resources on their phone,” said Tim Seldin, founder and President of the Montessori Foundation and Chair of the IMC. “For no cost, they can get information about Montessori and our different initiatives. Each organization (Montessori Foundation, IMC and the Family Alliance) have their own pod that showcases everything that is happening.”
The International Montessori Council has been facilitating resources to Montessori schools for over 20 years. The app becomes a one stop shop for schools to find the weekly webinars, access Montessori Leadership, look for resources, learn about accreditation, access a professional development course, schedule one-on-one consultancy, and much more.
Building a mobile app wasn’t a new idea for our organization. Seldin said they had been intrigued by the idea of having their own custom mobile app for montessori.org resources for some time. “The reason we didn’t do it before — and we’ve really thought about this for a few years now — is the cost has been astronomical,” said Seldin. “I mean, we actually bought a do-it-yourself app maker, and it frankly never worked correctly. It was a giant pain in the neck.”
As soon as we met the founders of Onespot, a startup that empowers any school to have a custom, school specific mobile app without needing to write a single line of code. We were able to get something up and running very quickly for the Montessori Foundation, the International Montessori Council, our Montessori Family Alliance, and our Montessori marketplace. That’s really complicated. The Onespot platform could take that complicated system and make it simple.
“According to a recent TechCrunch article, people around the world now spend an average of four to five hours per day using mobile apps. That number continues to rise, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The platform is similar to website builders, like Squarespace or Wix, but for mobile apps. Complex organizations (schools, businesses, non-profits, or even montessori.org) can use Onespot to make custom, easy-to-use mobile apps. And because the platform was developed with scalable technology, the founders can keep the pricing incredibly affordable while still providing top-notch customer service. “It was just obvious to me that they were on to something,” said Seldin.
As this is the first iOS and Android mobile app of its kind, The Montessori App is exciting for the whole Montessori community worldwide.
Montessori schools tend to use many online tools these days for communicating with parents about student progress or sharing other communications.
This new app brings everything together in one place, so parents and faculty don’t need to remember five or more different websites and download five or more different apps. This is the first app that deeply solves the community side of Montessori.
“It’s like a Montessori super app,” said Samuel Buchanan, one of Onespot’s founders. “It’s a new home for all Montessori resources, and Montessori schools around the world are starting to move in.”
One of the first schools to create their own custom app within The Montessori App is the Montessori Children’s School in Key West, Florida. “I like it because it kind of ties us into a bigger picture, so people see it’s not just our little school down here; there’s a bigger entity out there,” said Amy O’Connor, the school’s Executive Director. She added that if parents “want to grow more with Montessori, there are all sorts of resources on montessori.org. I just think it gives more of a lift to substantiate what we’re doing here.”
Jessica Losardo, Director of Operations at the Montessori Children’s School, is also excited about the new app, saying that “should a parent consider Montessori, they can go to the Montessori Foundation’s app and actually research all the different schools to see how they compare to each other— what they’re doing similarly, what they’re doing differently— so that they get a very wellrounded idea of Montessori.”
Having their own app for their school within The Montessori App allows the Children’s School and a growing number of other Montessori schools to consolidate all their existing platforms and websites into one central spot on the device their community members use most: their phones.
According to a recent TechCrunch article, people around the world now spend an average of four to five hours per day using mobile apps. That number continues to rise, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Centralizing all their school-specific platforms has been tremendously helpful for the Children’s School. “I was starting to feel like we had a lot of places that we were asking parents to visit,” said O’Connor. “We use Montessori Compass, School Cues, and a program called Clockify for parents to document their volunteer hours. And it just seems like a lot of apps.”
And they’re not the only ones feeling overwhelmed by the growing number of different apps and platforms a school community needs to keep track of. Seldin, who has worked with hundreds of Montessori schools over the years, echoed the same sentiment, saying that “parents find it very frustrating to remember how to access their child’s records or the school calendar, or, you name it. Even though most schools provide answers on their websites, it’s not always easy to navigate on a smartphone.” He added, “As we end up with more and more online tools and more and more online ways of communicating, there’s really something to having one central place to collect it all.”
The Montessori Foundation launched The Montessori App to be precisely that—one spot for everything Montessori. As Montessori schools worldwide continue to join in with their own app inside The Montessori App, this unifying solution is spreading quickly to the whole Montessori community.
“All our work-related stuff is there. Or, for a parent, all their school-related stuff is right there”, said O’Connor. “I think it just makes life easier. And when it’s easier for the parents, or the staff, or whomever, then the school experiences more engagement.”
You can learn more about this collaboration between the Montessori Foundation & Onespot by downloading The Montessori App. See how your school can join the platform by visiting www.MontessoriMobileApps.com (https:// www.seabirdapps.com/montessori-school)
