Remind

• Remind.com (formerly Remind101)
• com is a website that hosts text message communication while maintaining privacy and security for those involved. It is specifically tailored for use within education settings for students, teachers, and parents.  This free service can allow for both one way or two way communication between students and faculty, or between other students within a group.

Pedagogical Ideas

In the classroom, Remind.com can be used in a variety of different ways including:

• Promote communication – Communication using Remind is quite multifaceted:
  1. One Way Communication – Instructors can send message to their entire class (or just individuals) as reminders without requiring a response. Some examples could be, “Hi Class!  Week 2 assignments are graded!”  or “Hello (name), please contact me about your missing assignment in topic 3”. 
  2. Two Way Communication – Remind allows the instructor to toggle a setting that will allow for students to respond to messages with questions. Additionally, these settings can include a range of hours (i.e. office hours) where responses are enable or disabled.  This can be useful for semi-synchronous communication about a difficult assignment.
  3. Group Communication – This has huge potential within a CLC assignment. Within a group Remind.com chat, students are able to text message each other while keeping private information (i.e. phone numbers) safe and secure.  Additionally, in these group messages, instructors are able to monitor the conversation and even save transcripts of the messages/conversations that took place.  Giving CLC groups an additional platform to collaborate allows for easier communication during stressful group projects in the online environment.
• Enhance student satisfaction – Comments within EOCS surveys as well as informal classroom surveys demonstrate that students appreciate the added communication that Remind.com offers. Students felt this technology helped them to stay on track with deadlines and tasks within the classroom and, since it was sent to their personal phone, had a stronger personal connection to the learning experience.
• Encourage Students to Review Information – While message in Remind.com can be tailored to say just about anything, the most beneficial use is to re-direct students to resources and announcements within the Loud Cloud classroom. For example, messages like “See week 2 announcement for assignment example” or “be sure you have 6 substantive post ribbons for this week”, prompt and encourage students to check into the class and review their work.  This has the potential to also increase overall student achievement within a course.
• Increase Synchronous Student Communication – Coupling a Remind.com message with a link to a Zoom meeting has shown to increase student participation rates in Zoom welcome calls. In a yet unpublished study by a couple of colleges, participation rate in a Zoom welcome call without remind was 11% and with the inclusion of a Remind message, participation jumped to 36%.
• Modeling Good Teaching – Since this tool is used extensively by K-12 schools nationwide, we are modeling current teaching practices to our students and potential future educators. This helps to promote GCU’s excellence in training high quality educators.

How do you utilize this technology in your classroom?

Please share your thoughts, ideas and suggestions for utilizing this technology to foster effective teaching and learning.