The popular Russian app for education and learning, the MES diary, has reached the finals of the GESS (Global Educational Supplies and Solutions) Edutainment Awards – electronic diary for students and parents. The mobile software from Russia will vie for first place in the Best Free App/Software category.
The MES Diary is already very popular in Russia: a million people use it. With the help of this app, parents receive push-notifications with their child’s grades for the day, homework for all subjects, monitor children’s attendance, monitor the child’s nutrition in the school canteen and their purchases from the cafeteria: study the composition of dishes in the school menu, set up a list of “prohibited” products and daily spending limits. In the near future, on the MES Diary app, there will be the possibility to order hot meals from the cafeteria menu of the educational organization. A voice assistant can be connected to the app, and all information about the child’s timetable, homework and grades can be heard. Users can also chat with teachers if needed, and parents can create an absence notification in the app in just a couple of minutes.
For students, the MES Diary app is more than just a timetable and grades, it is a complete digital learning environment. The e-diary is part of the digital educational platform “Moscow E-School” developed by two Moscow departments – Education and Science and Information Technologies – in 2016. The platform’s users have free access to more than two million items of educational content. This year another 45 thousand educational materials and tools, interactive presentations, project and research tasks, virtual laboratories and tests in different subjects will appear on the platform. Teachers from different regions of Russia, major Russian publishers, and IT companies are involved in completing the MES library. The electronic knowledge base can be accessed 24 hours a day and from anywhere in the world – this played a huge role during the pandemic, when many schools of the world had to switch over to a remote format. Thanks to the MES system, Russian students were able to continue their studies at home without losing access to textbooks, educational materials and communication with teachers.
The number of users of MES services amounts to over 2.8 million people – among them approximately 60 thousand teachers, 1.1 million schoolchildren and over 1.7 million parents. The MES electronic diary in Russia is presented in two versions – a web version and a mobile application available in App Store and Google Play. It was the mobile version that reached the finals of the GESS Edutainment Awards, which awards educational products, resources, services, as well as the best educational institutions and teachers. The international competition involves 59 countries and 800 digital products, educational projects and teachers are up for grabs. Winners will be announced at the GESS Dubai conference in November 2021.