OK school creates smartphone app for students, parents

 Need to know the score of the high school game? Or how about what they're serving in the school cafeteria? Well in Norman public schools, there's now an app for that!
Norman is the first school district in the state to unveil a smartphone app that connects anyone to the district unlike ever before.
You can use it to quickly check school closings or call any school office.
Norman wanted to be proactive about communication and make it easy to use.
Norman North High School students Kris Nickell and Taylor Duncan do everything through their smartphone.
Their phones are loaded with apps, but their newest one lets them communicate directly to any teacher via e-mail.
"Click in any teacher's name and then click 'search' and it will find that teacher," Duncan said as she showed us one of the app's many features.
In their app store on their iPhone, they simply searched for "Norman Public Schools" and downloaded the district's brand new app that connects them to everything school related, including their test scores.
"With this, at lunch if I'm worrying about something, I can check it real quick and if I need to go talk to the teacher at lunch, I can," Nickell said.
The district even posts school-related videos on their app.
"There's some stuff on there like the YouTube stuff that I didn't even know existed," Duncan said.
"I think schools today need to be proactive about communication," Norman Schools Superintendent Dr. Joe Siano said. "Instead of everybody always waiting for people to come to the school door step, we should be going out to that community."
Siano said the app was developed by the company "School Connect," which operates within the Norman Economic Development Coalition.
Anyone can connect to a school's latest news, lunch menus, contact info, Facebook, Twitter, calendars and even GPS directions.
And it's all at your fingertips.
"I do think that the app makes accessibility to that information easier and in a way that people are doing it today," Siano said.
"You can take it anywhere with you and you can check it at anytime during the day," Duncan said. "I mean, it just makes it a lot more faster and a lot more simple."
The Norman School District app is now available for both Apple and Android systems and it's free.
School Connect's website states, "we are now working with Oklahoma City Public Schools (Oklahoma's largest school system), Moore, Midwest City-Del City, Bixby and many others."