Remind: School Communication 4+

Awesome for texting but lacks features for educators

Being able to text people in a class or small groups is amazing and very helpful. However finding individual texts is very difficult to do...there’s no way to sort or organize msgs and if you receive images or attachments from members (students) they are also extremely difficult to find after several threads. You’d have to download or copy the attached picture right away because if you miss it or if you don’t do it immediately then you might as well forget it. The new features to attach files from different platforms is amazing but if you can’t receive msgs in a way that’s easy to organize, you might as well stick to email for more classroom related tasks like assignments and schoolwork communication. If it’s being presented as a tool for constant communication in an educational context it would be most helpful to sort msgs or find attachments somehow in a way that’s efficient and organized. It’s also difficult to find contacts when parents and students are not separated or filed easily, especially using it in the primary grades where the main contact or only contact is with a parent (you still need to know who’s parent they are) and adding that to the “notes” is not the best option.

Phản Hồi Từ Nhà Phát Triển ,

Thanks for sharing! Please reach out to us via Rmd.me/help and we will be happy to look into this and assist further.

A great teacher-to-student ap and vice versa

When I returned to teaching in the fall of 2018, I knew some teachers were using Remind but I did not see what the big deal was. Mr. Covid has made it very clear to me what the big deal with Remind is.
Remind gives a teacher the convenient, easy, and quick way to communicate with his/her students, either individually or as a class. Remind also gives each student the same option to communicate with his/her teacher.
If a student has a problem or issue that s/he does not want to share in front of the entire class, Remind is the perfect vehicle for that student-teacher communication, especially if the teacher has his/her phone out and available while teaching - as I now do.
Why not just use the school's email system? Simply because many students now do not check their emails frequently. They use phone aps to send and receive messages. I know now that Remind is a terrific phone ap for useful and needed teacher-student conversations.
I am now a true believer in the power of Remind and will be making extensive use of this ap in the fall when my school district returns to in-person instruction. I strongly recommend all other teachers do likewise.

Some inconveniences

It’s fine to receive basic reminders.
We use for school admin to parent or teacher to parent and Vice versa communication. The free version has very low character limit (140) so it’s hard to fit even basic info-so then it’s a reminder and see attachment. Which you can only attach one picture or file. So that means sending several messages which leads to over notifications, which then parents are bothered. (There are plans available for higher character around 500 is the one my school finally switched to. This is very helpful. Idk the cost on the administration side, but I appreciate it both as a teacher and parent.)
On the parent side if you have receive notifications turned on then it’s really like two notifications because you get the notification and view it. But then you still have to open the app and view in the app for it to be marked read, otherwise it still looks like you have a new message. Also if several attachments were sent in a row you have to open each one separately. So it’s small inconvenience but adds up.
I do like how you can individual message within groups so it’s a way for parents to connect without sharing numbers. And you can individual connect with a teacher. But each teacher had to make their own group.
Overall it functions for its basic purpose to send a brief reminder to a group of people who have signed up-but that’s the key-very basic.

Phản Hồi Từ Nhà Phát Triển ,

Thank you for sharing! A regular SMS message is limited to 160 characters by cell carriers. We use 20 for your class name or signature, which leaves the remaining 140 characters for your message. We've just launched a couple Remind Plans that include new features like much higher character limits and phone calls. If you think your administration might be interested in upgrading to a School or District Plan, you can send them here: remind.com/plans.