ParentSquare

I use this as a teacher. Prior to switching over to PS I have used Remind and Class Dojo. I liked both applications for what each brought to the table. Although I did favor Remind a bit more for its usability. At one point my district tried to get us to use Sangha and I refused. It was a terrible and unfriendly program. This year they introduced PS and I have officially closed my Remind account and moved over to PS. Whether I’m using the app or on my laptop it has the best of all messaging apps. My word count is larger, I can post videos, pictures, links, etc. I can schedule messages. Sending private group messages are much easier than on Remind. I like the “forms/permission” option. My parents said it was super easy to sign a permission slip. And best of all? I don’t have to hope that all my parents will join the app. It’s connected to our student rosters so I know that almost every parent will receive my messages.

Mac specific: the messaging app will delete what you are typing when you hit the space bar it takes too long to message a specific child’s parent. On my end, it doesn’t make sense for me to click “message” —> “private message”then the next screen just be a comprehensive list of all the students contacts listed alphabetically. Even you have as little as 10 kids in a class, that is a list of 20 - 40 people. It’s also a problem because it assumes you know a child first and last name starting the first day of school, since the students are organized by last name. It also takes too long because you can’t search a name within in a class or grade. So if I need to contact “John’s” parents, I have to type “John” into the search bar and all the “Johns” in the whole school pop up. This isn’t much of an issue if I’m a lower elementary teacher with one class. But if I’m upper elementary + and teaching multiple classes (even across multiple grade) this search bar is not good. Then once you find the parent you’re looking for, it takes to long to send the message from just navigating the app. Often times we do not have more than 3 minutes to find a student’s contacts then craft a message (and those three minutes will be interrupted) so everything needs to be faster / less clicks / less scanning and reading. More filters for the search bar. And let me type freely with out deleting the message. Overall, needs to be more efficient. Think of teaching as a sport. Everything is in constant motion so tech needs to be as efficient as possible.

My kids’ school district implements ParentSquare. For the most part, it works. You can receive messages and send messages. If you are a member of a single school or multiple schools, you have segmented views and messages. What prevents this app from being actually enjoyable by parents is that it handles notifications extremely poorly. Ultimately I want to get important notifications for the school and related to my children’s classes. What I don’t want to get are the district level marketing notifications. The way the notifications settings are segmented and controlled in the app are a confusing and clunky mess that makes it so that parents are inundated with notifications with little control except to explicitly turn on or off with no properly tested middle ground (digest is not a working solution). You end up with constant red dot notifications. Also, even if you read a notification or press the “Mark All Read” action, the red dot notification is not properly reset, leaving you with having to reopen the app and refresh the notifications until it registers as read. This makes me want to simply disable the app’s notifications from my iOS notifications settings, meaning I could miss critical messages. But the fatigue is real.