July 15, 2015

• By

Nathan Yergler

Introducing group conversations on Remind

How-to and Tips

I taught computer science to high school students for three years, and it was an incredibly challenging and rewarding experience. One of the classes I taught was an advanced programming elective. This class provided students with the opportunity to build their programming skills through project-based learning. I'd often get emails from students with questions about their projects, and any answer I sent them outside of class would need to be repeated in class, taking up valuable time. I needed a way to respond to student questions that kept everyone in sync.

Today, we're excited to launch the next iteration of two-way messaging—the ability to communicate with multiple students and parents in real-time. With the new version of Remind, teachers are able to include up to 9 students, parents, or other teachers in a conversation. Students and parents can participate in the conversation through the app or over SMS or email. Once you've started the group conversation, you can keep participants in the thread engaged and informed in real-time.

groupchat

Group conversations have been the #1 requested feature since we launched two-way messaging, and it unlocks lots of new uses. Teachers can now communicate easily with parent volunteers, groups of students, or a student and her parents.

Now that teachers can message other teachers in their school, departments and subject teams can keep in sync with each other over Remind as well. Teachers working with project groups can keep everyone on the same page, respond to questions, and see how students are sharing and working together.

When we decided to upgrade two-way messaging, safety remained a top priority. Group conversations provide the same office hours controls we debuted with all two-way messages, so teachers can let others know when they're available.

Conversations on Remind would have been a great tool for my classroom; I think they would have saved time and given students a single place to look for updates from me. I hope you find these changes as exciting as I do. These changes build on all the great feedback we received when we launched two-way messaging. That feedback helped us improve this feature to meet the needs of teachers everywhere.

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