Now teachers and students to stay connected 24x7 with FollowMe247!

Information dissemination is a major issue for all institutions; academic and non-academic alike. What do you do when you wish to convey a single message to a large group of individuals, for example to a large number of students in a school? Usually schools rely on the passage of the information from one person to the other, but this method isn't reliable when the information under consideration is something as important as cancellation of examinations.

Startup FollowMe247 aims to address this issue by leveraging the power of the ubiquitous mobile phones. FollowMe247 utilises a model for removing the communication gap and connecting the students and teachers of any college/university. Although most students with smartphones have access to internet, there is still a small fraction that remains elusive of it. To address the entire community, without ignoring the feature phone users, FollowMe247 has developed this product.

Three friends from SRM University, Shashank Vaishnav, Anshul Soni, and Sandeep Singh Chatwal started FollowMe247, while pursuing their B.tech. "We initiatedFollowMe247 in SRM University where it has been adapted in a very favourable way. Within 2 months, we are having more than 5000 registered students and almost 200 teachers who collectively sends around 2500 SMS on a daily basis and they have given very positive feedback about the idea," says Shashank.

Just a mobile phone connects the teachers to their students. This works on a very simple basis of subscription, where students will be following the teacher (using unique class code), and both of them will be following their higher authority and so on. A teacher cannot only pass official information on a short notice but also motivate a student by being personally in contact with them. It does not require any Internet connection. Privacy is maintained as no mobile numbers are being exchanged. Saves a lot of paperwork and man power.

How does it work?

1. Firstly a Class Teacher has to make an account on FollowMe247.

2. They will be provided with a class code (that will be unique).

3. S/he then has to ask their students to follow them by writing a specific message that will contain the name of their college, the class code, their name and other information that the college requires such as their registration number etc.

4. As soon as the students send the message to a specific number, they will be automatically following their Class Teacher.

Post this, the class teacher can send updates about their exams, holidays, messages that need to be send on a short notice to the students through SMS.

followme247 classroom — All the Class Teachers of different departments directly follow the Head of the Department and all the Head of the Departments will follow the Director of the college and so on and so forth. Now a Director of the college has a passage through which he can send a message to any student of any branch, to a whole class, to a specific branch or to the whole college at once. He can even send this message via his mobile to a specific class, branch or the whole college. Hence a student can get updates about anything that the teacher wants him to instantly which can help a student to make use of certain opportunities that he could have been ignorant about.

An interesting concept indeed, the advantages of FollowMe247 are not limited to just this. A full data of all the students along with the class they belong to, their names, class id, etc can be integrated at one place. Also a really important feature here being a mode of communication that circumvents DND phone numbers and delivers SMSes instantly.