Brought to you by the team behind Remind101. We write about mastering classroom communication, texting in schools, and the products that can help.
Showing 5 posts tagged communication
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This fall we decided to write a blog post on “The 10 ways to use Remind101.” Since that post, we continue to discover creative use cases that open up fantastic new possibilities.
It’s not unusual for me to stumble across a teacher using Remind101 in a new way. When that happens, I try my best to share their story on Facebook,Twitter or here on the blog.
One memorable recent message was this gem:
Teachers have found ways to implement Remind101 into every grade from K-12, and higher ed. As one would expect, we’ve recognized distinguishing difference in the ways Remind101 is used at each level.
I decided to delve a little deeper into what those differences were, and asked a few teachers to help me out by offering their story on how they use Remind101 in Elementary vs Middle vs High School.
Elementary:
Eric Carlson:
5th Grade
Northwinds Elementary
Buffalo, MN
Summary: Communication with parents/families. Bridging gap between school and home.
“I stumbled upon Remind101 a year ago and it has made communication with my fifth grade families a breeze! I use it to let parents know of upcoming tests and classroom/school news. I love how quickly and easily I can get word to parents. Parents love the texts and/or emails. It makes them feel more connected to classroom happenings.
The best feature is the scheduling of future messages. I can plan ahead and schedule a message to go out whenever I want. Want parents to know you have a test coming up but don’t want them to know too far in advance? Schedule the reminder to go out 2-3 days in advance. Slick! The possibilities are endless here!
I have a few 5th graders sign up for Remind 101 but for the most part it is my student’s parents. They appreciate the communication. It’s easy to sign up for and a great school-to-home communication tool.”
5th Grade Math, StuCo Advisor, & Tech Ninja
Fields Store Elementary
Waller, TX
You can read Todd’s blog at: http://nesloneyflipped.blogspot.com
Summary: Communicates with parents/families and students with phones. Keeping everyone informed, and on task, with due dates.
“I use Remind101 to remind my students and parents about upcoming field trips, homework that is due, and other school events. Because I do a “flipped Classroom” model they have to watch several instructional videos a week, and Remind101 really helps me with reminding students and parents what is due when. It is also a great way to quickly send out reminders about events. I don’t ever even access the Remind101 website, I do all my messages from the Remind101 app on my iPhone because it is just so easy to use! I also made sure to sign up for my own class reminders so that I could ensure messages were being delivered! That has really helped with the “well I never got a message” excuse.”
Elementary Takeways:
It is much more common to communicate with parents during these years as the students are less likely to have their own phone. Giving parents the “inside scoop” on what’s happening in their child’s classroom lets them be involved without being there. It fosters more parent involvement in their studies, and short quick messages on a regular basis make it less work for the teacher to keep families informed.
I also love hearing stories about Remind101 being used at this age to give parents tools to help teach at home. Teachers can send spelling words and reading lists to the parents, or trivia questions on what they did in class that day. It takes learning into the evening, and I love that.
Middle School:
6th Grade Reading and Language Arts
You can read Laura’s blog at: www.mrsfenger.wordpress.com
Summary: Easiest communication method to notify parents about classroom work.
“As a 6th grade teacher, I use Remind101.com to send daily messages about homework to parents. The ability to text message parents makes a huge difference. Parents who don’t have access to email, often can receive text messages. I’ve had several parents tell me they really like getting my messages. Several other teachers in my school use it for this purpose, as well. Being able to communicate easily with parents makes my job easier.”
Summary: Communicates with both students and parents/families about homework, scheduling adjustments and class announcemnts.
Middle School Takeaways:
Most middle school teachers communicate with both students and parents.
More students are getting their own phones now, but it’s still a good time to keep the parents involved in messages. It can give the parent a birds eye view of what their student is intended to accomplish, while the simultaneous communicate with students empowers them to feel like adults. Sharing messages directly with students gives them an opportunity to prove their own accomplishments…without Mom and Dad.
In middle school I also see trivia questions and motivational messages start to spur. Motivational messages are a particularly important aspect of communication. No child going through the difficult life adjustment that is puberty can hear, “you’re doing amazing, keep it up” enough.
High School:
AP Human Geography
George Ranch High School
Richmond, Texas
Summary: Communicate directly with students as secondary measure to “writing assignments on the board,” routine changes, and reminders of what to bring to class that day. The option is open for parents to sign up as well, which many do.
“I use Remind101 to communicate primarily with students although most of my parents subscribe to the updates as well. At open house one parent after another told me how much the loved getting texts from me. They like to be “in the loop” of what’s going on in class. My students actually prefer to get text reminders via Remind101 rather than having them written on the board. Mostly I send out reminders about due dates and what supplies should be brought to class on a given day but recently I’ve utilized the system to alert my students about last minute changes in our routine (ex. meet in the computer lab instead of class).”
Branford High School
Algebra 1/Honors, Intensive Math 6th & 7th
Branford, Florida
Summary: Use for classes and organizations. Both students and parents can opt into recieving messages. Send messages on many topics including homeowork, necessary supplies for days work and scheduling reminders.
“I found Remind101 on Pinterest this past summer. I have set up classes
for each of the preps I teach. I also sponsor two student organizations.
I provided both the students and the parents with the same group sign-up
information. I send all types of information. I try to send homework
reminders at a reasonable hour so parents can assist their students. I
also send reminders about club meetings, and school holidays. I’ve even
sent requests for supplies for my classroom. It has been a wonderful addition to my resources.”
High School Takeaways:
High School means cell phones are abundant (not like you need me to tell you that). Students are already texting like crazy. So communication via Remind101 has done something we didn’t expect, it’s bridged the teacher-student gap. Something about the communication via text actually makes students more comfortable with their teachers and more open to asking questions and getting involved.
Most high school teachers make parent sign ups optional at this level. We believe you should always give an enthusiastic parent appropriate access to their childs education. So I love to hear about high school parents still excited to get the messages.
Again, motivational messages, and texts including opportunities to learn after 3 pm (trivia, study tips, etc) are great at this age. You’re now getting into a good place where current events and historical dates can be learning moments, and Remind101 is a great way to foster that.
If you have a story about how you’ve been using Remind101, I’d love to hear from you! Reach out to us at contact@remind101.com, on Facebook or onTwitter and tell us all about it.
Christine Garland is the Marketing Engineer at Remind101, you can tweet her @cagarland
When you land on Remind101.com for the first time you’ll read, “A safe way for teachers to text messaging students and stay in touch with parents.” From that communication point on you’ll hear us throw around the word “safe” often. We describe ourselves as a company, and our messaging service, as safe. It’s the word that has resulted in numerous product decisions and sets us apart from similar services to ours.
The safety of our teachers is extremely important to us. You deserve the opportunity to use tools in your classroom that make a difference, without fearing the repercussions of their implementation. We’ve tried, and we hope are succeeding, in offering that comfort with our messaging service.
This blog post is here to act as 2 things.
1) A simple explanation for our teachers of the features put in place by Remind101 to keep you safe.
2) A resource to be shared and distributed to parents, administrators, district heads, and anyone else, that will gain valuable confidence in the implementation of Remind101 at your school from reading this.
What makes Remind101, in a word, “safe”?
No exchange of personal information:
Your Remind101 messages are not sent from your personal cell phone number. You don’t even need to own a cell phone to use Remind101. At the time of sign-up, we issue you an anonymous phone number used only for sending and receiving your messages. As a result, students/parents who sign up to get your messages will never gain access to your personal cell phone number.
Students/parents subscribe to receive your messages by sending a text or email from their personal device with your distinct class code. Once subscribed, they can only be identified by their name (which they provide) on your class roster list. This process ensures that a teacher never has access to a student or parent’s personal information.
One-way mass messaging:
Remind101 is a one-way mass messaging service. This means that all messages sent must go to your entire class list. No teacher has the ability to communicate directly with one student. This precaution is in place to disallow any form of bullying, favoritism, or inappropriate conversation. For the same reasons, subscribers are not able to reply to any messages sent.
Logged communication history:
A log of all messages sent are saved in your account. These messages can never be edited or deleted. This means an accurate log of your communication history will always be at your fingertips should anyone question the content you have, or have not sent.
(We are also in the process of building in the ability for you to export your message history so you can have a hard copy for your records. Stay tuned!)
Preventing inappropriate language:
A lesser known feature in place is the detection and removal of inappropriate language. When a student or parent first subscribes we ask for their name. Occasionally, kids will be kids and send back a stream of inappropriate content instead of their name. When this happens, our system detects the “bad words”, removes them, and replaces them with inoffensive symbols.
This way, when the student name appears in the teacher’s account, s(he) will be able to fix it without dealing directly with any vulgarity.
Server security:
Every click, page view and text message is handled by the Remind101 application, which is hosted on a cloud platform called Heroku. Their business focuses on server management, scaling and implementing security best practices. This frees us up, allowing us to spend our time building great products. If you would like to learn more, Heroku has dedicated an entire page to explain their security provisions, all of which we automatically inherit.
As the company continues to grow and release new features or products, safety will continue to be a defining factor in our decisions. We’re on a mission to never give you a reason to second guess our tools.
If there is anything you don’t feel we’ve covered, or you have questions about these or any other features of Remind101, please reach out to us:contact@remind101.com
Twitter has been a great place for us to meet and get to know teachers using Remind101. It’s always exciting to start a conversation with a teacher tweep, and rapidly turn the relationship from a follower to a friend. One notable twitter-tastic teacher that fits just that story is Todd Nesloney, a 5th grade teacher at Fields Store Elementary in Texas and an #edtech advocate. I don’t remember exactly when we first started chatting with Todd, but I do know that after one conversation we’ve never stopped. So I was thrilled when Todd said he would write a guest blog post for us on his use of Remind101.
Let me just start by saying that I love Remind101. I discovered Remind101 in July of this year (2012). I was at a Mathematics conference in Texas, and in one of the “Web 2.0 Tools” session, a teacher interrupted the speaker to tell about a new website she had found. Let me tell you, that after hearing about it, no one was mad she interrupted the speaker. From attending the entire 3 day conference, the Remind101 tool was the most beneficial piece of information that I left with.
After playing with Remind101 a little, my head was spinning with all the ways I could utilize it to communicate with my students’ parents and my 5th graders themselves. I could also see the HUGE benefit of secondary teachers using it. I do quite a few technology trainings for my district and other districts (as co-founder of The 3 Tech Ninjas; @The3TechNinjas), so right away I started presenting on Remind101 everywhere I could. Now I can proudly say that just about every teacher in Waller ISD uses Remind101. I’m also trying to continually spread the word about Remind101 on Twitter (Follow me at @TechNinjaTodd)
Parents have expressed how much more “in-touch” they feel with what’s going on. I send out reminders about tests, homework, field trips, and more. As students get older, many of them do not bring home letters to parents, or relay much information at all. Due to Remind101 that is no longer an issue! I can’t say thank you enough to the developers and creators of Remind101. It is a tool that has completely revolutionized the way I keep in contact with parents and students without crossing any confidentiality or privacy rules! I love Remind101 and am excited for the future of this company!!
Todd Nesloney
5th Grade Math, StuCo Advisor, & Tech Ninja
Fields Store Elementary
http://tnesloney.wix.com/math
http://www.the3techninjas.org
Thanks again to Todd and his fellow Tech Ninja’s for being such key players in spreading the word about Remind101. We wouldn’t be where we are without teachers like you!
We recently got an email from a teacher using Twitter to communicate with her class and parents. She had heard about us and was considering switching or adding Remind101 to her communication tactics. She’s had success with Twitter and likes using it (can’t blame her, I’m a twitter addict,#guilty), so she asked in our words what the difference would be in using Remind101.
Which raised the important conversation to us, what are the differences between Twitter and Remind101?
To be very clear. This is NOT a Twitter vs. Remind101 conversation. We adore Twitter. Remind101 is not a replacement for their service. There are extremely distinct differences between our platforms. It’s up to each teacher to decide what they feel is the most valuable communication use for their classroom.
To sum it up, Remind101 is a system built for simple safe messaging in education. Students/Parents cannot reply to messages, and it does not allow for individual conversations. Messages are sent straight to a subscriber’s phone for immediate on the go alerts. Twitter is a social, microblogging platform for conversations. A lot of teacher’s are using both in their classroom in order to capitalize on their separate, and equally awesome, values.
What are you using to communicate?
