Thank you for your willingness to pilot ParentSquare, a tool dedicated to parent communication. You may have asked why another one when we have so many other systems. It’s basically because updating and managing email lists for parents in our LMS is impossible, there’s no way to target messages to specific groups of parents, and this new tool allows parents to receive notifications via text which is key for many of our Spanish-speaking parents who use text but don’t use email (I was shocked about how many students do not have any parents registered).
Anyway, we envision teachers using this platform simply as a way to send info to your parents and share cool things you are doing in the classroom – basically keep them in the loop.
We’re hoping our AVID, IB, DPEA, SPED, etc. will create their own parent groups so they can target communication for them as well.
It would be great if each of you could recruit a “buddy” teacher to do it along with you (but not mandatory!). A nice, soft roll-out is what we’re looking for so teachers can get used to the interface and hopefully see the value. I know that a few years ago when I created parent google groups for my classes, I got a lot of great feedback from parents on how connected they felt to what their children were learning (and when I asked for post-its, I got a ton…still using what was donated!).
Again, thanks for being willing to help us out. Let me know if you have any questions.
