ParentSquare 4+

Honestly as a technically challenged parent this app scared me. After exploring the easy to use app, and using the readily useful communication tools my comfort level eased quite a bit. The videos seemed slow and do get stuck making viewing a lesson difficult, but none the less I’m still impressed. Actually I was struggling a bit with my son on the subject of learning in school. Despite the COVID-19 crisis I feel like I’m developing a much closer relationship with my son as far as discussing what he’s actually learned and where he needs help. I also feel much closer to his teacher giving me the satisfaction of actively being apart of the education being presented to my child. This has been a very positive experience for not just my son, but the entire family! My two year old can now participate in educational activities with his brother instead of racing out to the curb every morning to wait for the big yellow Twinkie that he doesn’t get to ride.

Update Oct 2024 still ridiculously difficult to get rid of app alert notifications. The weekly aeries emails take multiple viewings to get the badge to go away. Come on.

Update: no change. Still ridiculously difficult to get rid of alert notifications in app. How many times do I have to view an email?

Using this because I have to with our school district now. I was happier just getting emails from the district because I could just set up rules to auto junk the stuff I don’t care about. The navigation is awful. Left navigation, View by school, view by student, view by alerts. Drop down navigation, switch between all of them. It needs a rethink because it tends to be very hard to find what I’m looking for. Notifications are very difficult to clear, usually involves going to the alert, scrolling to the bottom, refreshing the view, then going to another screen and hoping the alert count goes down. I’d really like a way to not be notified about everything. Some granularity would be nice. Like I don’t need it for the weekly progress reports from aeries, but I would want it on a direct communication from the teacher. Overall it does what it needs to but that’s about the best I can say. I dread seeing an alert badge because I’m going to spend the next five minutes getting logged in because it somehow lost my session, and then trying to clear the notifs.

If I was in 1 building and not a parent and a teacher I might like it. However. I work in 4 buildings and cannot combine my groups so I must send messages to students in each of my 3 elementary buildings separately . The posts come separately from each building and you must log into that building in order to see the messages and posts. There is no central location.
I have a daughter in the 4th building I work in. So I get the posts -too many- from her building admin, teachers, and my students and parents. My other daughter attends the 5th building in our district. So your see there is a Constant stream of texts coming to parent square. I receive emails telling me I have a parent square and texts telling me to check parent square. Too much to keep track of.
I have asked my students’Parents about it. Their students have been reminded but still miss remote classes so I asked. The parents of children in separate buildings tell me they don’t pay attention to it. They get too many texts and cannot access them easily.
So, I give it a 3 because it is useful, but not very friendly for teachers in multiple buildings or for parents with more than 1 or 2 children