Schools and classrooms

A classroom needs a way to reach the office that isn’t a teacher’s own mobile, and the office needs to reach a classroom without a walk down the hall. A phone on the classroom wall or desk does both, with nothing on it that a class could wander into.

What it does

• The office in one press. Each classroom phone has the office staff, the nurse or the caretaker on its keys, and reaches any ring group by its extension (MENU, 6, the number). The office rings a classroom by its extension too.
• Ring groups for the staff. “Office” rings whoever is on duty at the front desk, all at once or in turn, and goes to the office’s shared voicemail if nobody answers.
• School hours. Outside the hours you set, calls go to voicemail or to the person on call.
• Calls to a partner class. A room with its own address lets two classes, even at schools on different servers, talk on a call the teachers set up: a pen-pal class, a visiting author, a sister school abroad.
• Every call stays in the school’s space. The school’s admins see the call history and the changes made; nobody outside reaches a classroom unless the school has connected with them.

The classroom phone belongs to the school, not to a child. The kids’ phone rules (a guardian’s allow-list, quiet hours) are for home phones; at school the staff decide who the classroom phones reach.

Start

1. Get started with an Organization space for the school.
2. Pair a phone in each classroom, and set up extensions and ring groups.
3. For class-to-class calls, make a room and put it on a key.

A classroom phone can be an old tablet today, running the phone in a browser. The hardware is an early prototype: see Boards and cases.