text messaging |

What makes Remind101 safe?

By Christine Garland

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

Nova Middle School Breaking Communication Barriers

While emailing with Florida’s Nova Middle School principal, Jermaine Fleming, over the summer about Remind101, I learned that their use of our product came out of a desire to break through frustrations in effective communication between school and home. Their story is an important one, so I asked them if we could share it with the rest of our Remind101 teachers. Jermaine passed on my request and I quickly heard from Casey Woehr, an ESE teacher at Nova MS who shared this fantastic testimonial with me:

Teachers at Nova Middle School (NMS) in Davie, Florida are embracing the
use of 21st century technology to break down the communication barriers
that often exist between school and home. In the past, middle school teachers, who often have 120+ students, have had a hard time sharing classroom happenings with parents on a daily basis. The utilization of Remind 101 during the 2012-2013 school year is helping teachers at NMS overcome this. Remind 101 is being used to help teachers communicate important messages such as upcoming quizzes and tests, changes in homework, and important deadlines with both students and parents.
NMS parents are excited about this new communication system, which helps them stay informed with all of the important events taking place in the classroom. Additionally, coaches and club sponsors have created accounts to remind students of upcoming events. All staff members are excited to find new ways to use Remind 101 as the school year progresses.

Happy to be a part of your communication plan Nova Middle School! Thanks for sharing the impact with us.

You can connect with Nova Middle School on Twitter @NovaMiddleTitans.

Coming soon to a Remind101 account near you:

Just a Remind101-er that we’re still listening! Top 2 projects we’re working on, and one we’ve decided not to work on. Behind the scenes at Remind101 HQ.

1) Automated URL Shortener - BuildingEver notice when you’re typing in a message on Twitter.com and you paste a big longgggg URL in that for some reason you still have a suprisng number of extra characters left? That’s because Twitter automatically shortens URL’s when you paste them. You can’t see it, all you know is that it seems you’ve tricked the 140 character limit.

Well David and Jeremy are working on implementing the same kinda thing for Remind101. What does this mean for you? A couple things:
A) If you’ve been going to a 3rd party site to shorten your URLs, such as bit.ly, or tinyurl, to save characters before pasting into your Remind101 message, you won’t have to do that anymore.b) As many of you have experienced, we have issues sending out messages that include goo.gl or fb.me links in them. For some crazy daisy reasons, cell carriers are flagging those URLs as spam, and not delivering them. Once we get this URL shortener in place, you’ll no longer have to worry about that.

2) Scheduling Repeat Feature - BuildingHave you noticed that we’ve started to ask around about what you would do with a scheduling repeat feature if you had one? That’s because we’re starting to work on one!

The problem is - we can’t get very far without your help. In order to build it right, we need to gather as many sample use cases on what you would use a scheduling repeat feature for as we can. This helps our dev team determine what the tool needs to include now, and needs be able to handle in the future. So, if you have an example of how you’d like to use this feature, let us know in the comments section below, on our Facebook page, or on Twitter.
We need to know:
A) What you would send
B) How frequently you would send it
C) For what duration of timeFor example - “Reminder to turn in library books, every Friday, for 6 months.”

3) We are NOT building - the ability to Message individual, or small groups, of users within a class list

Many of you have asked for a way to message small groups, or individuals, within your class list.

We did A LOT of investigating over the past few weeks on adding something like this. We talked to teachers all over the place about the feature concept, and gathered as much feedback and data as we could. After all our talking, we pooled together everything we learned. In the end, the conclusion was very clear - too much risk for not enough reward.
Yes, it would be nice to have at times, but it would open too many doors for potential dangerous risks: one-on-one meetups, bullying, favoritism, and more. At Remind101, we take a lot of pride in the safety of our product. Our goal is to help you communicate easily and effectively without ever having to think twice about it.
If you need to contact a student or parent individually, the good news is, there is always a way to get ahold of them. For now, it just won’t be through Remind101.

Hope everyone is as excited as we are about making these next steps!

Canadian Numbers Have Arrived!

The long awaited arrival of shiny new Canadian phone numbers is finally here!

Startinggggg…….NOW! Canadian users can enjoy Remind101 without worrying about additional fees.

Shouts to our dev dudes, Jeremy and David, for making this happen!

Few things you need to know:

1) How to switch your current US phone number to a Canadian number.

Login to your account on www.remind101.com. (You currently cannot use our iPhone app to change your country settings.)

Once logged in, go to “Account” and “Me” in the upper right hand corner:

Scroll down your account page until you see the “Country” option. Click the country dropdown and switch from, “United States,” to “Canada”. Then save your changes by clicking the big blue “Save” button:

You are now the proud owner of a Canadian phone number! But before I congratulate you, let’s make sure it worked. Head back to one of your class invite pages and see if your number changed:

If it did, CONGRATULATIONS!

If it didn’t, email me: contact@remind101.com.

2) So what does this mean for your current subscribers?

Besides the fact that they’ll never have to worry about extra fees for accepting your messages again, nothing! There is no need to have them re-subscribe. The next time you send a message, it will come to them from your new Canadian number.

3) Have you been waiting for this day to start telling your co-workers about us? (Pretty please.)

Go ahead and tell new users to sign up like normal. Our intelligent little system is set up to know they will require a Canadian number and will assign them one automatically.

Thanks for being patient while we got this new feature ready. Especially @MsBelangerMusic, @courosa, @gcouros, @ethnicomm, & @kevingerrior.

We’re super excited to finally offer our neighbors the freedom to go text message crazy!

Questions? Concerns? Crisis? Let us know here, on twitter, facebook, or via email: contact@remind101.com