How to Create an Educational App: No Coding Needed

Why Choose Shoutem for Your School or University App

Sure, our educational app template makes creating your app with Shoutem easier than you’d imagine. But Shoutem offers countless additional perks as well, including:

Create in Days with App Templates

You can create an MVP for your education app in just a few days using our pre-built templates.

Our user-friendly app templates — including one specific for the education industry — already include all of the most-loved app features for each industry. But if you’d prefer to start from scratch using our blank app template, you can do that, too.

And it’s worth noting that our app templates have been tried, tested, and approved by thousands, so you can feel confident knowing that your Shoutem app will provide a great app user experience.

Customizing your Shoutem app doesn’t require any special ability, either. Our app builder makes it easy.

1. Choose an app navigation style.
2. Add your preferred app features.
3. Drag and drop them into place, rearranging as needed.
4. Use the ‘settings’ section to set colors, upload your brand logos, etc.
5. Bulk-upload app content or set up RSS feeds to populate your app automatically.

With your app built and customized, just rely on our in-app preview tool to confirm your settings, then get ready to publish it to the Google Play or Apple App Store!

Build for Both Apple & Android App Stores

Shoutem allows cross-platform development—meaning you only have to build your edtech solution once, then publish to both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store with no additional work.

This saves time and development costs. It also means fewer integration setups, fewer app updates over time, should you decide to add or remove features at a later date. Just make your changes in one place, and publish your app updates to both stores at once.

Incorporate Top School Integrations

Ideally, your educational app will integrate with the educational software your school district or university system already use. This enables faculty and staff to streamline learning processes for students and make sure activity on your app communicates with activity on other platforms.

Shoutem offers several integration capabilities to help make this possible. Be sure to review integration capabilities with your learning management system (LMS), online learning platforms, and other day-to-day tools.

Streamline Fee Collections & Purchases

Shoutem apps integrate with a number of payment gateways—including Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, PayPal, Stripe, and more—to allow students, parents, and guardians to quickly and easily pay school fees.

One popular way to do this is to use pre-built monetization app features to create online “products” for different payments. This might include listings for different types of band equipment; school or group uniforms; individual field trips; before- or after-care program fees; application fees; or other similar costs.

Users can then browse the in-app “School Store,” add the necessary items to their cart, and complete their purchases using your preferred payment integration.

Always-Available Customer Support

There will always be a learning curve when you do something for the first time—like creating an app. But we live by our goals of enabling the easiest app-building process possible. For that reason, the Shoutem team offers multiple channels for customer support, including:

• Email support: Send your questions and receive personalized assistance fast, directly to your inbox.
• Tutorial videos: Browse our library of tutorial videos, where you can watch Shoutem experts walk you through platform features and processes.
• Step-by-step how-to articles: Use our step-by-step how-to articles as a checklist of sorts as you learn how to make and modify apps.
• Shoutem peer community: If you have a very specific question that our tutorials don’t answer, try asking the Shoutem community. We make it easy to share advice and ideas with other Shoutem users.
• The full-service team: Want premium access to us? You can hire our full-service app creation team for a fraction of the cost of traditional app development.

Start-to-finish support, today and every day.

Must-Have Features to Include in Your eCommerce App

Shoutem makes education application development easy with more than 40 different drag-and-drop app features to include in your app. The following are some of the most well-loved features for educational apps.

News Feed

Make the News Feed feature the central location for sharing all of your school’s need-to-know information, such as:

• Publish updates on any and all topics
• Make announcements
• Promote upcoming events
• Request volunteers

Interactive posts allow commenting and social media sharing, so users can engage, ask questions, and share posts with the larger community.

School Event Calendar

Post your school drama performances, football match-ups, field trips, and club meetings all on one searchable and filterable school calendar. Provide detailed information for each event so attendees know exactly where and when it will occur, as well as what they should bring, or how they can purchase tickets. And beyond standard events like these, digital learners can even use Shoutem’s Booking feature to request parent-teacher conferences, set up virtual study halls, and more.

Online Tests & Quizzes

Teachers can schedule and conduct online tests and quizzes using Shoutem’s Custom Quiz feature. This feature also enables teachers to schedule assignments in advance, collect grades, and set deadlines for test completion. The effect: Students now have full transparency regarding what is due, when, and how their grades stand at any given point throughout the semester.

PDF Course Materials

Shoutem’s PDF upload feature allows teachers to upload course syllabi, digital textbooks, study guides, educational games, and other online course learning materials to support their curriculum. Administrators can share essential documents like school codes of conduct or emergency procedure forms. And event managers and club leaders can share permission slips, event announcements, and related resources. Finally, once documents are shared, you can utilize push notifications to make target audiences aware of the newly posted resources now available in-app.

Individual User Profiles

Using Shoutem, you can create user profiles for administrators and teachers, allowing students and parents to access contact information, office hours, and other necessary information. You could even create user profiles for students or guardians, and make this information accessible only to those users who have approved access—such as enabling one parent to view (and communicate with) all of the other parents of students in the same class.

In-App Messaging

Allow your app users to securely contact one another using integrated messaging. Whether this is Teacher-Student, Teacher-Parent, Parent-Administrator, or otherwise, real-time app messaging makes it possible for everyone work together towards student growth and success. In-app messaging can even be linked with user profiles, making it easy for anyone to reach out to the person they need to speak to with ease.

Advanced Search Functionality

There are tons of notes, bulletins, and event notifications sent out every day from a single school—and as a student or parent, finding information about an upcoming event can be difficult when sorting through all the rest of the notifications. Shoutem’s search functionality enables users to type in key terms and let search filters pull up related resources.