There are many ways to make learning fun and interactive for teachers, students, and even parents. That’s why apps like Remind have been made specifically to ensure seamless and secure interaction between teachers, students, and parents. As many learning institutions embrace the hybrid mode of learning, it is imperative that teachers choose the best apps to complement their teaching and improve their interaction with students and parents.

Let’s look at why Remind should be on top of your education apps if you are a teacher and how you can use it to foster collaboration and interaction in the classroom.

What is Remind?

Remind is an app and website platform where teachers can share resources and communicate by sending secure messages to different recipients. These could be students, parents, or other teachers.

It makes collaboration among teachers and students easy as this can be done directly to an entire class or different sub-groups. The different classes or sub-groups are differentiated by unique codes sent via text or a link to the target members to sign up. For example, you could invite students to join your foreign languages class or parents to join the monthly class meeting group.

As a teacher, you can manage up to 10 classes and have as many students and parents added to your group. You could also add other teachers to the group. For younger students, their parents could use their email for joining hence being part of the conversation and also monitoring conversations.

Ways Remind is revolutionizing Interaction in the Classroom

Scheduling Reminders

Reminders are great for managing deadlines. Whether for assignments, school activities, teachers’ or a parents’ meeting, sending out reminders is a great way to keep everyone engaged and getting things done at the right time. For example, this fantastic Remind feature could be used for organizing a school trip, reminding students about a quiz or test, reminding parents about a class meeting, or communicating scheduling changes for events and other activities.

Sharing Classroom and Professional Development Resources

Interactive learning is gaining prominence with the advancement in technology. With Remind’s stamps feature, teachers are now able to share classroom and further learning resources in the form of text, pictures, links, videos, and other files on the platform for students to access.

Stamps could also be used to share quizzes and ask students about their opinion on different learning topics. You could make it interesting by sending students some warm-up questions or trivia before class. Better yet, you could share links with other teachers to different professional development resources.

Engaging with Parents

Well, wouldn’t it be nice if parents are made part of their children’s learning journey? That’s how Remind bridges this gap by allowing teachers to share important resources or information directly with parents. For example, parents could be added on the classroom Remind platform to view projects done by the students, or access further resources to help them understand their children’s learning journey.

A teacher could also send messages directly to parents regarding their child’s behaviour and learning progress. Through the stamps feature, parents could also share feedback or recommendations on what they feel could improve the learning outcomes of their students.

Fostering Collaboration Among Students

Apart from using Remind in the classroom for communication between teachers and students, a teacher could create a more collaborative environment by allowing students to message each other on the platform.

To make it interesting, you could divide the students into different sub-groups and let them choose a team leader to spearhead the discussions. This is a special feature that would enable students to hold discussions on different topics or assignments. It also gives them time to research further outside the strict classroom hours, gaining a better understanding of the topic under discussion.

One great feature about Remind is the ability to pause a conversation. If you feel that students are taking too much time on the platform outside classroom hours, you could pause the discussion. This means that no one will be able to reply or add comments, until a time when you as the teacher deems necessary to continue the discussion.

Enhancing Secure Communication

In this era of cyber-attacks and the push for data privacy, Remind, unlike other communication platforms, offers a more secure way of interacting with your students or parents. How is this possible?

When parents or students sign up for your course or join your group, they will appear on your list, however, none of the participants will view each other’s contact information. This prevents incidences where group members take someone’s details without their consent and minimizes the risk of receiving unsolicited messages.

Making Learning Visual and Interesting

The stamps feature is so powerful that it brings a whole vibe into the classroom setting, doing away with the monotonous slides and dictation as is usually the norm. When a teacher shares a question or quiz, students can reply with stickers and other fancy icons and symbols like stars that add functionality to the content and make it more visually appealing.

This would be very ideal especially if running a poll on what topics your students would want more emphasis on or short quizzes that don’t require lengthy responses. Another feature that makes it interesting is the ability to get transcripts of the conversations or activities carried out on the platform. So, if you were running a poll, you can share the results directly with your students.

Also, the fact that you can link the platform to other third-party platforms like zoom or google meet makes it more interesting as students, teachers, and parents can hold live virtual events right through the Remind platform.

Conclusion

Interactive classrooms or learning environments are always every teacher’s dream. Thanks to platforms like Remind, this is now a reality.

From sending reminders, sharing learning resources, to communicating with parents, the options are limitless with Remind. Remind should be a priority app on any teacher’s list because of its simplicity, effectiveness and it’s free. Of course, there are other optional premium features that would enhance the platform experience but you can start with the free version.

If you are ready to start using the platform, check out these steps and follow the onboarding guide to help you get started and hopefully achieve the classroom of your dreams.