Apps for Parent Teacher Communication

The classroom website for students at Santiago Hills Elementary School, Irvine, CA was enough for the teachers to communicate with the parents, until one day, Lindsey Vose thought otherwise. She teaches Kindergarten and first-graders at the school and is one of the first few who welcomed newer updates in technology in the classroom. The initial classroom website allowed for updates every week, but Lindsey wasn’t quite keen on that. She wanted to share classroom activities, field trip photos and other updates with the parents of her students in real time. This is how the application of BuzzMob in that school came into being.

Diane Levine, professor of Education at Wheelock College advises, “A positive parent-teacherrelationship helps your child feel good about school and be successful in school.” But the semester-end meeting or the weekly reports are not enough nowadays. Parents need to know everything about what is happening in school. The K-12 education sector has been a key witness to this communication turbulence over the years. But the proliferation of technology has calmed this tremor a substantial amount. This is how the apps for parent-teacher communication came about. Let’s take up from where our elementary teacher Lindsey Vose left off.

• BuzzMob: Launched as a pilot program for the 2013-2014 school year in Orange County, California, BuzzMob gained instant success with its increasing demands from schools all over California. This multi-function app serves as highly effective communication resource for parents, teachers, staff and students. This hassle-free, user-friendly app can be used easily in mobile phone platforms. BuzzMob provides for a private network that cannot be accessed without authorization, making it a secure and safe platform for users. According to Jeff Jackel, CEO of BuzzMob, “The value in launching an app like this affords the ability to easily and readily communicate outside the classroom giving parents a more connected relationship with their child’s education.”

• Class Messenger: This app helps teachers to easily communicate with parents or students via personalized text messages. Parents will be able to get messages, receive push updates by email or text. Messages can be sent to parents of the whole class or to individual parents as well. Messages can also be categorized into ‘General’, ‘Homework’ and ‘Reminders’. This easy-to-use app keeps parents, teachers and students in sync throughout the school year. Parents can be kept updated and informed about the various notifications and activities in the classroom.

• Google Apps for Education: The free suite of productivity tools offered by Google apps for education comprise Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs and so on. Millions of students, teachers, parents worldwide have benefited from Google apps. They can be implemented in meaningful ways in the classroom and outside to increase efficiency, collaboration and engagement. Parents do not anymore, need to dig through piles of paperwork to pick out the relevant homework assignment or any assessment of their student. Google apps have made communication easy and quick.

• Remind: Remind is an easy-to-use app that helps teachers to communicate with students and parents outside the classroom. With a user base of 1 million teachers connecting with 17 million parents and students, Remind is being downloaded at an alarmingly fast rate because of it’s exceptional services. It allows teachers to send instant messages, notifications, assignments, assessments and many more to students or parents. Jessica Deon, a fifth-grade teacher in west-central Louisiana could be quoted as saying, “The word I use is ‘transform’.?It transformed my classroom. And I think it made me a better teacher.”

• The Teacher App & Grade Book: This is a very useful educational tool for parent and teacher communication which offers an array of unique and amazing features for the same. Teachers can interact with parents by sending individual and group texts. Teachers can updates to the class calendar, put up assignments, add attachments and notes for parents and teachers to view. What more, with this app all information could be kept confidential too.

Parent involvement in studies increases student motivation. Parents should know what is actually happening in the classroom and how much of the classroom education their children are being able to grasp. For this to take place, teachers needs to communicate with the parents and the above apps let them do exactly that and much more. There are actually a number of apps available to make the job easy. If you want to add a few to the above list, feel free to do so in the comment section.