All updates
Week of 01-Sep-2026 – 07-Sep-2026

Contests, and a diary that comes back signed

This week belongs to the two apps. Contests & Voting arrives — a teacher runs the whole contest from their phone, families vote from theirs, and the result lands on Buzz. The School Diary goes digital: one note to a student, a group or a whole class, a parent's signature requested, and a running conversation instead of a line in a paper diary. And Buzz learns to spot your child in the photos.

Contests & Voting School Diary Smarter Buzz 9 updates

Most school software stops at fees, attendance and marks. The life of a school — the fancy-dress contest, the note home that must come back signed, the photo of your child on the sports field — usually stays on paper and notice boards. This week both EDII apps picked those up. Everything below ships in the Teacher app (V2.9.16) and the Student & Parent app (25.48.27), rolling out on the stores now.

Contests & Voting, end to end

Teacher app: run the whole contest from your phone. Create a contest in the app, add the entries — photos, videos or YouTube links — and follow the tally as votes come in. A rangoli competition, a debate, a science-model showcase: set it up between two periods.
Close it, announce it, keep it. When voting is done, close it from the same screen, announce the winner, share the result to Buzz for the whole school to see, and save it as an Event — so the contest lives in the school's record, not in one teacher's memory.
Student & Parent app: the vote is theirs. Families see the open contests and every entry, cast their vote, and can change or remove it while voting is open — then see the results when it closes. A Buzz post about a contest now opens that contest directly.

The School Diary goes digital

Teacher app: one note, exactly the right homes. Send a note to one student, a selected set of students, or the whole class. Ask for a parent's signature where acknowledgement matters, and families are notified the moment it goes out — no diary page to check, no note that never made it home.
See who has signed — and who hasn't. Where a signature was requested, the teacher can track exactly which families have acknowledged the note, instead of collecting diaries at the classroom door to find out.
A conversation, not a one-way slip. The diary keeps the complete parent-teacher exchange in one thread, and the teacher can reply again whenever a parent responds — the way a good diary note sometimes turns into a real conversation.
Student & Parent app: read, sign, reply. School notes now arrive in the app — read them, sign where acknowledgement is required, and continue the conversation with the teacher from the same screen.

Buzz learns whose photo it is

Teacher app: students identified in photos. Buzz can now identify students in selected photos automatically, or a teacher can tag a student manually by class and section. Confirmed and suggested matches are shown right on the photo, so a sports-day album gets named without an evening of typing.
Student & Parent app: find your child faster. The tagging pays off on the other side — photos of your child are now easier to find in Buzz, instead of scrolling every album from the annual day hoping to spot them.
Photos open properly, everywhere. Across Buzz, Voting, Homework and Tickets, images now open full-screen with a clear Close button and return you to the same screen — no more taps landing on controls underneath, no more app left stuck behind a photo.

The paper diary and the notice board, in the app

A contest that used to live on a notice board, a note that used to live in a paper diary, and a photo that used to live in someone's camera roll — this week all three moved into the apps both sides of the school already carry. The teacher runs it from one phone; the family answers from the other. More next week.