Has anyone ever heard of the website http://www.remind101.com? I came across it last night and thought it looked like a great idea. It's a free service through which you can send text or email alerts to students/parents. They never see your real phone number, and you never see their phone numbers. You only see a list of names subscribed to your classes. The way it works is that the teacher signs up for the account and is provided with a random phone number and class code for each class that is created. Students and parents send a text message to the phone number (with the code in the message body), and that subscribes them to your class. Alternatively, if they want the email alerts, there is an email address that serves the same purpose. When you create a message, you can send it out immediately, or set it up for a particular date/time in the future. If you have an iPhone, there is an app that you can use to do it on there. I think it seems like a great idea. I have posted my homework assignments on my class website for several years, but I am thinking of switching to this service for the upcoming year and only putting the more important projects/handouts on my website. If anyone has experience with this service, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.
Someone here posted about it a few weeks ago. I signed up on it and tested it out. I like it, and I can't wait to use it this year.
I've also signed up and used it. I loved it. I sent myself a message close to midnight and it warned me it was too late to send a message. I think that's a good feature.
Can you use it only for outgoing messages? I don't know that I'd want 130 kids/parents being able to contact me through my phone :unsure:
Thanks for the responses. From what I understand, it is a notification system only, so no one can contact you through it.
I learned about services like these (there are a couple out there) last year and shared them with our counselor. I thought it was perfect for her to use for scholarship deadlines. For some reason, she ran into some resistance from admin. I do not know the details. Though I love tech and try to make use of it in my classroom as much as meaningful, this one doesn't make my pistons fire. I'm not sure why. I guess part of me is thinking, "they see and hear about deadlines, do they really need another reminder?" I'm totally ok with a student using his phone to schedule his own reminders in a calendar app, but for some reason this just seems to be another way of making the world too easy for students that are a few months away from the real world. Ack. I don't like that I just typed that. I am usually so PRO tech. Why do I hiccup over this one?
I know what you mean. I don't think I will be using this with my seniors, who get a monthly calendar that, in my opinion, should be sufficient notice for assignments. On the other hand, I am looking forward to trying this out with my ninth graders, particularly since many of their parents try to stay on them to get their homework done. I'm sure those parents would like the daily alerts, at least.
I was thinking about it for parents this year. We do very little "paper" work and do not send homework home other than home readers and that makes it hard for parents to know what to review at home. We have a weekly newsletter, but we didn't see many parents using it last year. Does anyone know if you can set up a weeks worth of texts at a time. I could schedule them for the week on Monday and be done with it.
Yes, I think you can set up multiple messages in advance and then just specify the dates/times for them to be sent.
You can. I did that a lot this year. I used and really liked remind101. About 1/2 of the people that signed up were kids, but the other 1/2 were parents. I didn't use it for homework every night, but I sent messages about big projects, events, book orders, and so on. I know the parents who used it really appreciated it. Of course, my kids are a little younger (7th grade), so they're not as responsible yet. At that age, they need all the reminders they can get!
Someone told me about it on my blog. Unfortunately I cannot use it because I am in Mexico. It looks wonderful though.
If you use Edmodo, I believe you can have students and parents sign up for text alerts through that, too. That might work in Mexico.
