New Ways to Share Updates and Special Moments with Parents

Busy parents always appreciate getting a glimpse of classroom events and seeing their child enjoying their time at school. Letting parents know what a student has been up to will also help you build a partnership with their parents, who will be able to start a conversation about in-class activity and thus, enhance learning at home.

That’s exactly why we’re rolling out two new exciting features: Stories and Inline Video.

Stories

You’re already familiar with Announcements, which allow you to post instant updates visible to all parents. Now, you can choose between a Classroom Announcement (visible to all parents) or a Story (visible to all parents or parents of one student). You can create a Story right from your home page and add as many pictures or videos as you like (parents love pictures!!). It is the easiest way to share pictures and notify parents about them. You can also select a specific student the story is about from a drop-down menu and only their family will be able to see it. You don’t have to even add a message, just load up the pictures, and share!

If you are looking to share important information, announcements are the way to go. Rather than a notification about posting a Story, parents will receive the full message as email or sms.

Inline Video

With video attachments being one of the most popular ClassTag features, it was time to make the clips easier to view. You can add a video to your Announcement or Story as normal, but rather than being available below the message as an attachment, it can now be played directly from parents’ feed (just like you’d see on popular social networks).

Scheduling Announcements

Keep your communications organized by planning ahead and scheduling important announcements ahead of time. With this new addition to Announcements functionality, you can bulk-schedule important messages for weeks ahead and be sure that parents will get them exactly at the right time. Now, you can get it all done at once, without worrying about overwhelming parents with multiple announcements being sent at the same time.

What’s next?

We’re always curious to hear what functionality would make your lives easier. Based on your feedback, we’ll be shortly releasing a Calendar View of upcoming activities. Soon, you’ll also be able to schedule your Announcements –  a true game-changer if you know what’s coming up ahead of time and want to bulk schedule your announcements.

Here’s a sneak peek of the new Calendar tab:

Which of these features are you most looking forward to using? What’s your dream ClassTag feature that we should work on next? Let us know in the comment section below 🙂 .