Remind101: Possibly the Best New Educational App

For those of you who always struggle to remind your students and/or parents of everyday classroom reminders like special events, trips, upcoming exams, etc., etc., Remind101 can make your life a whole lot easier.  

Remind101 is a new free classroom management app that puts important communication into the palm of a teacher's hand.  Remind101 is extremely user friendly; all you need to do is set up a free account and Remind101 will generate a phone number (to use for text messaging purposes) so that you can communicate with parents in 140 characters -- or less.  Now, really, what's so special about this kind of communication?  Well, for many teachers, not much...but for Remind101 teacher users, the phone number that is generated for you allows your own regular (and private) cell phone number to be just that -- private.  The Remind101 service allows you to communicate with your students and parents through their apps (iPhone and iPad) or through their website; all the while leaving your phone number to yourself.  Students and parents can't see your number...and they can't respond back either.  It's a one-way text messaging service to simply allow students and parents to get that important, "Don't forget that lunch money is due tomorrow" in a text message (or sent directly to their e-mail).

What I really like about Remind101 is that it even allows you to even set up a reminder for a later date and time -- certainly avoiding the "I forgot to remind my class" blunders that can happen during a busy day.  This works great on a Monday when you can set up a reminder to be sent out on Thursday night at a certain time to remind students that their math test is on Friday and that they should look over the chapter that is being covered for the exam.  In addition, you can also Tweet out that same message on your Twitter account or post it on your school's Facebook page as well!  Have more than one class that you're teaching?...set up multiple classes so that a specific message reminder only goes out to a specific class.

If you teach at any level -- elementary school, middle school, high school, or even at the college level and beyond, this is one app you'll want to make use of.  For principals and assistant principals this works great too...instead of a class, set up a faculty class...you'll be able to send out quick reminders to staff ("Remember, faculty conference is Monday afternoon in room 100!" or "Don't forget, there is a schedule change for today.") instead of having to always go through e-mails or websites.