ParentSquare 4+

I’m not sure why our school district didn’t start using this app before the pandemic. With all of the “I forgot it at school” excuses kids come up with having to do with time sensitive paper work, or school functions/events, there has always been a need for an app like this. It is probably the best thing to happen to students that have two homes. No matter how great the two parents/guardians get a long there will always be three unsolvable issues for children with two homes. 1) the ratio of single socks to matched pair’s drastically increases in favor of single socks far beyond that if a traditional household. 2) Underwear are either so plentiful you need a whole extra drawer for the surplus or, the only 2 pairs of underwear in the house are dirty. And, finally 3) only one parent knew about a permission slip, fundraiser deadline, club sign up, picture day, recital or some other important event, and that parent (even having the best of intentions) assumed the other parent knew as well. Our daughter’s lacrosse teams, swim team, and scout troop have been using similar apps for a couple of years now. It’s about time the school district doesthe same.

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: 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.