Conference Scheduling Made Easy! Awesome Idea from a BPS Classroom!

Mrs. Schopp, a 2nd grade teacher at Newman Elementary, uses technology to make conference scheduling easier for her and the parents in her room.  By utilizing a form, parents can sign up for conferences online, cutting down on back and forth paperwork between Mrs. Schopp and the parents. (Mrs. Schopp does still send home a paper note for students without access to the internet.  However, with most of her parents utilizing the online form, her paperwork is cut significantly.)  You could do this a couple of ways.

Mrs. Schopp has an awesome blog (check it out at http://www.schopptalk.com/) that she has created using Weebly.  When Mrs. Schopp created her conference form, she used a tool directly from Weebly.  It looks like this:

Click the image or click here to view the full page on Mrs. Schopp's blog.

You could also use Google Forms to create the form, providing the available times and allowing each time to only be chosen once.  This same method would work great for any volunteer needs you have in your classroom, as well!  Brilliant!

Mrs. Schopp also utilizes the tool Remind to generate parent traffic to this conference form.  If you've never used Remind, it's a wonderfully easy, quick tool for sending out messages to parents that are like text messages (without sharing your personal contact information).  It's free and it's great!  Click the link above to learn more about Remind.

Starting a New Year with Remind

If you used the awesome tool Remind in the past, and aren't sure how to start fresh for this school year, relax.  It's so easy!  Login to your existing account, and click "Add a new class."  Creating a new class will generate a unique code to distribute to your new students' parents so they can subscribe to your updates.

If you haven't used Remind before, but are interested, visit the site www.remind.com for details on signing up for a FREE account.  This is an awesome tool for safely and securely communicating with parents using text messaging.  (They also just added a chat feature.)  Using Remind allows you to quickly and conveniently communicate with parents and students using your smartphone without revealing your phone number or private information.  Great tool!