Dive Brief:

• Parent engagement is essential to student success, yet many teachers struggle to develop open channels of communication with their students' families.
• EdTech reports on four apps that can be used to communicate with parents, including Bloomz and SimplyCircle, which have social networking-like environments for closed circles such as individual classrooms or entire PTAs.
• ClassDojo allows photo-sharing and messaging that gives teachers a chance to keep parents in the loop on student progress, and Remind provides a platform for homework updates, reminders, and other notes that can be sent in the app or through a basic text message.

Dive Insight:

The beginning of the school year is an important time to develop routines that parents, teachers, and students can fall back on later.

While there are a number of apps that have created new ways to reach families, schools have to work to learn whether parents prefer other methods like email, phone calls, or, yes, hard copies of notes. Many parents will not be digital natives and asking them to learn a new app could be too much. A survey of parents about their communication preferences, formally or informally, at the beginning of the year creates a foundation that will help school staff deal with any problems that might come up throughout the academic year.

Recommended Reading

Ed Tech Magazine: 4 Apps to Foster Parent-Teacher Communication