Thing 18: Student Assessment & Feedback Tools

Remindchat- I have been looking for a way to communicate with parents and students outside of school that does not involve giving out my personal information including phone number. Over the last few years, I have been giving out my cell phone number to parents to keep contact with them. I have found a lot of success in it because parents seem to respond better to text messages as opposed to phone calls. The downfall is that I receive calls and texts at all times of days and night which can be difficult when I have responsibilities that I have to take care of with my family. As I was looking through the app., I found that you can set "office hours" so you will only receive messages during the hours that you set up when you make the account. In the beginning of the year, I tired to use an app but was unsuccessful because the parents had to download it and use a class code and I was only able to get 1 parent to sign up even after sending weekly flyers home for the first 2 months of school. This app. is different and better because you can send an invite right to the parents phone and they can just click a button to join the class. I am hoping this will allow me to have 100% participation from parents. Many parents are working during the day and cannot answer phone calls. This app. would allow me to communicate with parents during the day who cannot answer the phone. Parents can read and answer at their convenience. This app. would also be beneficial when it comes to documentation. It keeps track of all of the conversations back and forth so it takes the "he said, she said" out of the mix. When you go on the website, you can quickly print or email the conversations that you have had with each individual parent throughout the year. This documentation can be used as evidence during meetings for parents, students, administrators, and even helpful for RTI, IEP, retention and much more. Another benefit of this is that it shows when a message has been viewed. Once it has been viewed, a parent cannot say they are unaware of whatever message that was sent. Being able to send message to parents guarantees that they will receive it. By 6th grade, very few students are willingly sharing letter, especially negative ones, with their parents. Using this app., I can ensure that parents are in the loop and I can even reach out to them and let them know something is coming home so that they can ask their child for it and it does not get "lost" in their book bag. I am looking forward to testing this out with my students for the rest of this year and implementing it starting first thing in September with my new class!