New school year, new way to communicate with students

For several years now, I've been looking for a good way to text message students. Students today are much more likely to check and respond to text messages than to emails, but privacy concerns have made texting students difficult. At one point I heard a rumor that my college was going to give faculty the ability to group-text entire course sections, but that has yet to materialize. So this year, I went on a search for a service that 1) would allow me to message students in a way that masks my phone number, 2) includes an app for sending and receiving messages (rather than requiring a log-in to a website), and ideally, 3) allows students to text me back. Oh, and of course, free access is always preferable.

My search led me to the Remind service (formerly Remind 101). Remind is built for teacher/student communication, so it's easy to set up classes and invite or add students/parents to the appropriate groups. Sign-up was easy, and I had my classes set up in minutes. Remind meets my first two criteria - both teacher and student contact information remains hidden, and there are Remind apps for both iOS and Android (students can also use Remind with basic feature phones, though they may need to watch out for texting charges depending on their plan). Also, Remind is free, with no limits on the number of classes or students you can add.

A few other nice features of Remind include the ability to attach files, audio clips, or photos to messages. This will be handy the next time I realize that I forgot to hand something out in class or modify an instruction to an assignment. Messages can also be scheduled in advance, so you can organize and plan your messages ahead of time.

The only thing I wish Remind would do is allow students to message me back, and according to their support site, there are no plans to add this feature. The most recent upgrade of the app does allow message recipients to "stamp" a message with one of four icons -  a star, a checkmark, an x, or a question mark, which could allow a teacher to collect limited responses to a posed question. For example, I could send my students a text asking them to reply with a star if they felt like they understood the day's lesson or a question mark if they felt like they needed more class time on the topic.

I will say that in the short time I've used Remind, I've been happy with the results. When I email students, I know that some will see the message and some will miss it. The first time I texted students this term (reminding them about a quiz the next day), several came into class the following day and told me that they'd received the message and had appreciated the reminder. This week, I had a few students who I suspected were skipping class; I sent them a text (messages in Remind can be targeted to certain students), and wouldn't you know - they were back the next day. When I've emailed wayward students in the past, my results have not been as good.

I've done some further research on other texting options, and there are two other services I'd like to check out: ClassPager and Kikutext. Both of these services allow two-way texting, but both also limit their free plans, making a subscription necessary if you want to use the service with more than one class or more than a handful of students. Still, I plan to run the free trials to see if the monthly fee is worthwhile. Stay tuned for more information...