ClassTag offers easy communication with families. Once you create your teacher account, a demo classroom guides you through its features, and there are prompts when setting up your own class. It's possible that some of ClassTag's features duplicate communication tools your school already uses, such as announcements, but these can be personalized to meet your needs. You might also consider some of the specialized features -- such as the volunteer request and to-do items -- to help coordinate special projects or events with your students and their parents. The photo announcements are a great way to bring families into the classroom and share weekly student activities, helping parents feel connected.
The Parent-Teacher Conference tool is an especially helpful scheduling tool: You could certainly use it to schedule parent-teacher conferences, but you could also consider using it to help students and parents schedule other appointments with you or to sign up for time slots to make a presentation or participate in an event. Keeping families updated on classroom needs for supplies or volunteers is managed easily with ClassTag. It would also work well for communicating weekly student homework with the added ability to link to files.
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Power Up Your Parent Communication
Cheat Sheet: Proactive Parent CommunicationClassTag is a messaging tool for teachers and their students' families. Teachers set up a free account and create a class, and they can add parents directly or send parents an access code to sign up on their own and join the class. Teachers can use the app to create announcements and activities or schedule events/conferences.
There are four types of interactive "Activities" -- events, volunteer requests, to-do items, and parent-teacher conferences -- that have special interactive features to let parents or teachers sign up for tasks, such as bringing a snack or donating supplies. Parents can sign up for these items on their own, or teachers can add them to time slots or tasks directly. Teachers can add pictures and file attachments to their posts and can customize the "feed" for their class to pin certain posts at the top of the page to draw attention to them. Teachers and parents can also customize how the tool sends email alerts and reminders; items can be sent out to an entire class or to specific families. Meanwhile, teachers can view a summary of their posts for the week and get a summary of how their students' parents have interacted with them over time.
The most appealing part of ClassTag is the variety of communication tools that help teachers stay connected with families. There are tons of features available, and a new teacher account comes preloaded with a sample class that's full of sample content and examples to get teachers started. Plus, the menu for adding content includes helpful cues that make it clear which features do what; it's really useful to see which feature asks "volunteers to be somewhere at a certain time" and which asks people "to complete a task."
ClassTag enhances any existing school learning management system (LMS) because of its personalized approach for connecting with families, even with the occasional sponsored advertisement added to communications. Activities allow teachers to share classroom photos, ask for support from volunteers, remind parents of upcoming events, and schedule conferences. In that regard, ClassTag excels, and it might just be the go-to solution for keeping track of all the big and small ways that parents can lend their support, creating stronger communication.
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