Remind Launches New Slack-Like App For faculties

Jessica Hullinger February 17, 2016

When a bomb danger brought on officials to shut down all 900 colleges in the L.A. Unified school District final December, chaos ensued. perplexed folks acquired the information via robocall around 8 a.m. and scrambled to pick out up their children and find last-minute youngster care. Others didn’t get the call at all. communication between the district, principals, and lecturers collapsed. The risk uncovered the present emergency gadget’s weaknesses, but amid the mayhem, many educators grew to become to Remind, the four-yr-old messaging device for college students and lecturers.

“We noticed a 700% raise in messaging utilization during that bomb possibility,” says Brett Kopf, cofounder and CEO of Remind. “We began meeting with some lecturers and principals, and they were telling us it was once chaos. It made us understand there was a huge wish to have all the conversation in a single single place.”

as of late, Remind is launching a new product called Remind for colleges, a schoolwide communication software that lets principals send a message to their entire personnel. “think Slack for faculties,” Kopf says. directors shall be verified inside the app. Messages come with a supply receipt and common stats like which teachers are using the device most incessantly. Later versions will let principals message your entire college, together with college students and fogeys, and district-extensive enhance will be to be had within the second quarter of this year.

since launching in 2011, Remind has been on a tear. The app is used by 35 million academics, college students, and parents in additional than 1/2 of U.S. ok-12 colleges.

as soon as a teacher starts to make use of the software, it tends to spread via the remainder of the college like wildfire. Domonique Roberts, a historical past trainer at college high school in Newark, N.J., has been the usage of Remind to be in contact higher with oldsters. “i have been messaging one student’s mother, telling her when he’s not doing homework, or if he fell asleep in class these days,” Roberts says. “She’s on prime of it and his grade better with the aid of two letter grades from the primary marking length to the 2d, just with the aid of keeping up along with her.”

Kopf is obsessive about instructor pride, and this obsession permeates the whole company. every worker, from the CEO to engineers, spends one hour every week are living-chatting with a trainer. to verify no one interrupts the dialog, the worker dons a blue cape to tell coworkers they’re busy. the corporate additionally has 9 former academics on personnel. “Our primary company price is academics,” Kopf says.

This similar rule utilized whereas growing Remind for colleges, which is designed primarily for directors to communicate with group of workers (whereas Remind was once designed for one-on-one verbal exchange between lecturers and college students and fogeys). “We spoke to greater than one hundred teachers and principals to speak about their present desires,” Kopf says. “We discovered in talking to principals that the commonest type of communication is a robocall or phone tree system. They actually have a spreadsheet that says, ‘Jan calls John, John calls Joe, Joe calls Sally,’ and then a bunch of youngsters nonetheless express up at school.”

Kopf says directors have already been repurposing Remind to keep in touch on a big scale, so he needed to design one thing namely for them. for instance, Paul White, fundamental of Leal fundamental school in Cerritos, California, has more than 740 students and oldsters connected to his Remind account, and despatched them the entire comparable message all through a up to date power outage. “We despatched out a message saying, ‘howdy, don’t freak out if you can’t get through to the cellphone as a result of there’s an influence outage. I’ll can help you be aware of after we’re back up. We’re tremendous, nothing is mistaken.’ folks favored that.”

some other school ditched its morning intercom announcements and changed them with Remind blasts. “They’re just using Remind to ship messages out to teachers so that they don’t must waste 5 minutes of everybody’s day,” Kopf says.

the new instrument makes it more uncomplicated to get a whole school on board quick, fairly than counting on person teachers or administrators to unfold the word or send invites. Like the original device, it can be free, however Kopf says he could discover charging for it down the road. the corporate has raised $59 million in capital, most of it from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and has been the use of that cash to grow its person base. Roughly 20,000 schools have already signed up for get admission to to Remind for colleges.

“What we’re about to roll out won’t only carry communique to 1 position, but build a group so everybody is aware of what’s going on,” Kopf says. “In training, we imagine that it truly takes a village to fortify a kid, no longer just a teacher or a father or mother.”