Remind 101

Every teacher needs to find ways to contact parents and students outside of class.  We of course need to keep parents up to date on grades but if we can find an easy way to update parents and students on upcoming class activities, projects, etc. it would be even better.

Remind 101 is an excellent resource for interacting with students and parents outside of class.  It is a service that uses texting (you send the texts via your computer) to send messages to the phones of every parent and student in your class.  The best part about this is that, even though many of our students and their parents may not have internet access, almost all of them have at least one cell phone in the house.  Remind 101 gives you a method for contacting everyone in your class with pertinent information about the class.  It also is completely confidential no of your recipients get your phone number or the other numbers you are sending the message to.

Here are some examples of how it can be used:

• Remind everyone of a test on Friday, and since it is sent to parents, add an encouragement for parents to make sure their children study.
• Remind students and parents that a big project is due on Monday.  Send the reminder right after dinner so that forgetful student will be reminded.
• Update a homework assignment "for being such a great class today you only have to finish through problem 8 for tomorrow".
• Remind everyone on the Thursday of Spring Break about the project the need to have finished when they return on Monday.

Setting up remind 101 is a very easy process which I will demonstrate in the video below.  You sign up for an account, then you have students and parents text an access code to a phone number (You can create separate classes with different access codes for each of your classes).  After that you just start texting your students and parents.

Ways to get students and Parents to sign up:

• Have students sign up the first day of class
• Put the remind 101 number in your 
• When you first call parents have them sign up
• Email the # and password to your parents
• Encourage students and parents to sign up by emailing tips like "Make sure you look at example 4 before the quiz tomorrow" or "tomorrow seems like a good day for a quiz"

For those of you wondering why I didn't talk about websites this week, I decided to change the content of the blog in preparation for the beginning of 2nd semester.  I wanted to add content that could be used by teachers immediately when they start their classes in January