Whether their child is a sixth grader who is new to the middle school, or a senior at the high school, many parents want to remain connected to the school and what is going on in the classroom. Remind is an excellent free tool that can help teachers to improve the school-to-home connection by allowing you to text messages to groups of students or parents. One feature that makes Remind so great is that students and parents never see your cell number, nor do you see theirs. Students and parents merely need to "opt-in" if they wish to be added to your text messaging list. They must enter a confirmation code to state that they want to be contacted through the Remind service. If they don't have a cell phone, or if they must pay an additional fee for each text they receive, students and teachers have the option to have your messages emailed instead of sent to their phones as text. For those who do not wish to join your Remind messaging list, Remind can be embedded into your web page, blog, or wiki so they can view your messages.
As a member of the Communications sub-committee for the new MTAHS building project, I use Remind as a tool to push out notifications about what is going on with the project. Each time there is a new News post on the project website, I send out a notification to all of the community members who opted-in to receive texts with a blurb about the post and a link to it. I embedded the MTA Construction messages at the bottom of this post so that you can see an example of how they would appear if you embedded your messages into your web page, blog, or wiki. HERE is how community members joined.
Teachers can also schedule messages to be sent. Do you have a field trip on Monday? You can write a reminder for students and parents on Friday afternoon and then have it sent on Sunday evening.
Learn more about how Remind works by viewing the video below by Technology or Teachers and Students:
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