Remind

Remind is a text-messaging tool that is safe for teachers and their students. Remind serves as a middle man and relays messages to individuals without those individuals having your phone number. The book states that thirty-five percent of teachers use this tool. Teachers set up classes or clubs and can send out reminder texts. Students and parents can access these reminds via the internet, their phones, or the remind app that is available for IOS and Android. A teacher is able to set up multiple classes and can even send attachments. The attachments include voice clips, documents or PDFs, presentations, or images. Students can send a "stamp" back to let their teacher know their thoughts about the message. Parents can even sign up with a teacher or class so that they also get the notifications.

Remind is user-friendly. Once an account is made, a teacher can then put in what school they belong to and what class they are making a Remind for. This is done simply by typing in the name in the prompts. After a class is made the teacher can begin sending reminders. This is done under the classes tab. A teacher can also send messages if only a few students need to get certain information. To use this website and app effectively, a teacher would send out reminds to the students for quizzes, tests, or even homework. The teacher would also attach things that could be helpful. One example would be to send a reminder that permission slips are due, with a permission slip attached. Because remind is available online, students would be able to print off any forms or documents that they might need.

Personally, I would use this website to organize teams or sports. Many coaches and parents get bombarded with texts and calls all asking the same information. I think this would benefit the coaches because they could simply type one message and remind would take care of the rest. With the benefit of the stamps, a coach would know if he or she would need to contact a parent that has questions without every person receiving his or her phone number. I can also see myself using this for youth group reminders. Group messages can get confusing once people begin responding. Sending out a text through Remind would help the group leader not to get a lot of messages back all at once.

The book states that some schools have certain policies about how they would like their teachers and parents/students to respond. Because I am going into teaching elementary school, I think I would like to use this for parents of the students in my classroom. Many things could be sent out including spelling lists, permission slip reminders, images of schedules, and just updates in general. If my future school allows for me to use this program I definitely will! I can see it being most helpful with school closings and important information. One sad thing about today is that bad things happen at schools. If a tragedy of sorts were to happen at my school, I would be able to get the word to parents that their children are safe directly to their phones. This would really save time and help parents not to panic.