Marty Cryer
Using Technology to Communicate
Communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using
a variety of digital age media and formats.
Remind 101 and Sign up Genius are two resources I use to connect to parents. The first allows me me to let parents know about homework and important announcements via cell texts and the latter makes signing up for conferences, party supplies and so on easier for all.
Remind 101
Remind 101 allows teachers to contact parents and students individually or as a group, via cell phone text messages or email. After creating a class on the website, teachers have parents sign up using their cell phone. They can register to receive the notices via cell text, email or both. Once that is done, teachers simply type in a message of 140 characters or less, click the send button and off it goes. A new feature allows teachers to connect with parents individually or in smaller groups as well.
I have used this resource for four years now as an easy way to let parents know about homework assignments each day. It is quick and easy and if I forget to send it from my laptop, I can just as easily send it from my cell phone app!
Parents report it is very helpful to get the messages, even though students write down their homework assignments in their journals each day. I also have used this as a way to remind parents of important deadlines that are coming up, for example, book order due dates and permission slips.
Sign Up Genius
Setting up parent teacher conference schedules has traditionally been a rather difficult and time consuming task. Notices are sent home, parents respond with several choices of date and time, teachers tries to give each their first choice. This goes around and around until a schedule is complete.
Sign Up Genius makes this much easier. The teacher sets up a list of open meeting slots, sends an email via the website, parents sign up and the schedule is complete! The first time I used this resource I had my conference schedule finished within an hour of sending out the email. I shared the resource with other teachers and they all use it now.
But conferences are not the only reason to use Sign Up Genius. I have used it to get help with classroom parties, for collecting donations to send to troops overseas and for classroom volunteer needs.
There are other similar resources out there, but I like the ease of use with Sign Up Genius. Additionally, it has a nice layout and graphics, which for elementary school teachers is always important.