#collaborize classroom

Too often we are very worried about our children´s progress at school and how their life inside school walls is. The only way to know this is to hear it from teachers directly. In the past, unless your son or daughter were not so good students or had discipline issues, you had to wait 3 months to get all the information on school progress and grade reports. Not so often children lie about their grades or simply forget or just don’t mind going around without telling their parents what is really happening at school.

Well, this is a thing of the past with the following apps you are going to read about. Don Burns took the time to research a bit about which apps are the best ones to keep parents and teachers in touch with each other and here is a small list of them so you can start using them with teachers and children alike.

BuzzMob

This tool allows teachers and parents to connect within a network that needs an authorization so updates can be made. It can work as Twitter or Facebook on the update side so teachers can do it from their phones or any computer. The idea is to focus on people and unite the team: teachers, parents, and students. They also try to make everything simpler for teachers and give them the perfect tool to help inspire their students.

Collaborize Classroom

Collaborize Classroom is a free tool where teachers can design and hand out topic based discussions to anyone involved in the app.  There is a URL per lesson that every teacher can design as they want and share it via any social network or mail service they want. For example, a French teacher at Bella Vista High School in Fair Oaks, CA,  uses this platform to take discussions outside of the classroom, to communicate student progress with both students and teachers and to engage students in a more complete language education

TeacherKit

This is the perfect app for teachers and for them not to lose track of almost anything. This app allows teachers to take attendance, set up profiles about students with all their information and needs and track grades. What really makes this app a hit is that teachers can email parent directly from the app without having to go to their mail and do it through there.  If a teacher has multiple classes, which they always do, this app can manage all the classes with easy ways to edit and delete the class. The idea of the app is to make the administration of teaching easier and let the teachers focus on what they really know how to do which is teaching.

ClassDoJo

This app already has 35 million users around the world. In fact, 50% of schools in the United States use this app to make communication between parents and teachers a lot easier. It has the usual features such as capturing data on behavior, grades and progress and it allows the teacher to share this information with both parents and administrators.  This app is the closest thing parents can get to knowing what is really happening at school with their children and if their children are “on task”.

Edmodo

It is considered a teaching Facebook but it works beyond just a social network. Here parents, students, and teachers can collaborate with photos and reminders about special events or assignments.  They also have an agreement with the Cambridge University in order to teach GCSE to students in summer and they are expanding to the UK by helping out with the curriculums to design a “standard-aligned content”. With this strategy, all the information found in the Cambridge University Press will be open to parents, teachers, and students.

Image courtesy of Wesley Fryer at Flickr.com

Pupil Asset

Pupil Asset has already been in the market for some while. They have come up with a new product for parents called “Pupil Asset Parents”. In this product parents can check attendance on their children, they can see how they are behaving, they can see their reports no matter how old the reports are and they can see how their children are doing in the core subjects. With this app, all the information that the teachers need to give parents is already there and the meeting can be more about exploring options, setting goals and strategies to reach such goals and to focus on important issues that need to be tackled. A little bonus teachers and parents have with this app is that they are in control of everything and do not have to wait for a team to decide on their actions and that the app is very user-friendly for every teacher and parent out there.