I love this communication tool! The students in your classroom today are always connected. Some of them may not carry a phone or have an Instagram account, but that doesn’t mean they’re not always communicating. A few years ago I ran into this tool and I have found it very useful in communicating with both my parents and my students.
The great thing about @Remind101 is that it allows you to communicate with your parents and students and they can’t reply! 🙂 As many classroom teacher may or may not admit to, we like one way communication. Don’t get me wrong, we want to hear what parents think of us giving a test on a Monday or that the final project will be worth 20% of their child’s grades, but…. I’ll stop there. This amazing tool allows parents and students to sign up to receive text and/or email reminders. They sign up anonymously and they can stop at anytime.
Remind101 from remind101 on Vimeo.
There are Smartphone/iPad/Tablet apps available. A teacher can schedule a message to broadcast at a later time, which is great because I found in the many years using @Remind101 that student forget about message that are sent too early. I would schedule messages to be delivered about the time students leave their houses if I wanted to remind them to bring back something signed. If I was wanting to remind them about homework or to study for a test or quiz I would send it about the time they got home from school. You can even set up multiple reminders if you want to make sure they do something. I just scheduled the same message for every hour or two hour for that evening. One word of caution I would give you is, make sure your students have unlimited messaging. Don’t want a parent jumping your case because their child’s success in school cost them $0.50. 😉 Even for kids who don’t have text messaging they can sign up for email reminders!
Need Parents?
The last two years http://www.health-canada-pharmacy.com it’s been difficult for us to get parents to go with us on field trips (probably because they are scared you’re going to ask them to monitor a state test) and I have found @Remind101 a great way to get a parent at the last minute. Combined with GoogleVoice (I will talk about this next.) I was able to find a chaperone to ride the bus with us. I have also used this combination to get class supplies. “Hey parents, we need a rat for Monty, our ball pyton.”
Most of the time I sent a different messages to my parents and students. Parents can always sign up to receive both messages. I had a few times where students walked into my classroom and let me know they lost their phone because their phone wasn’t off and my reminder came during their last class. (I sent reminders all the time…) After laughing, I reminded them that’s why their phone should be off and left in their lockers. 🙂
Another great use of @Remind101 is daily questions to send your parents. A few times during the year I send home direct questions for the parents to ask their child. (Instead of “How was school?”, or “What did you learn today?”) I would also give the parents the answers…. Parents loved this, especially with 8th graders who don’t want to talk to their parents. It also reinforced what we were currently studying. With the great way that @Remind101 keeps a log of what messages you have sent, you could reuse the same messages next year!
Go to Remind101 today and signup! They will give you flyer with your new account you can hang it outside your door on meet the teacher, schedule pickup or back to school night. I used to have my parents take out their phones and signup at back to school night. I would have my students do the same thing in class. We all know that the majority of them have their phone on them anyway!