Vicksburg Catholic Schools are hoping smartphone technology will help keep parents better in tune with what is going on at its two schools.

VCS staff members developed an application — a program that can be installed on smartphones — that will allow parents and students to better keep up with what is going on at the school.

Patricia Rabalais, registrar at St. Aloysius High School, helped develop the new app for both the iPhone and the Android, two of the most popular lines of smartphones.

The app will inform users of school news, will allow parents to check their child’s grades and monitor their progress.

“It’s everything that you want to know about our school in one spot. It ties to our main website,” Rabalais said.

She said the app gives users access to the school calendar, news and sports. Parents previously had to visit a website to check their child’s grades. That website, Edline, is now integrated into the app.

“We post grades once a week every Monday,” she said.

Parents also have access to Renaissance Learning, which is a reading program where students read a book, take quizzes and earn points for those quizes. Using the app, parents can shop for books and see how many points their children have.

St. Aloysius principal Jules Michel said that the app is very useful and convenient.

“It’s got everything that you would go online to find, but now you can just pull up that app,” he said.

Rabalais said that St. Aloysius partnered with Blackboard to help create the application.

Blackboard, like Edline, is a software program aimed at reducing the need for physical paper and allowing access to educational material via the internet.

“Blackboard is big conglomerate that serves the educational needs of high schools and colleges,” she said.

The app was an option that Blackboard offered to the school as part of their partnership.

“They gave me the option to choose from so many things. I could choose the icons and I could choose where they were directed,” Rabalais said.

The app is free and allows users access to the directory, the cafeteria menu, a link to the diocese website, main contact numbers at the school and sports news. Parents can also change their tuition plans and pay their dues from the app.

“It’s a great way for us to keep in touch with parents, and for them to keep in touch with us,” Rabalais said.

For more information about the app, contact St. Aloysius at 601-636-2256.