The desire to enhance parental engagement seems to be permeating schools more and more. Immediately after taking over as Home School Community Liaison teacher last year, I naturally enough started looking for a suitable application that our school could use to further drive parental involvement in our establishment.
Some teachers have previously experimented with edmodo and many are currently using ClassDojo as a behavioural management tool. The school also posts weekly website updates which now automatically feed to Twitter. Newsletters are sent home monthly and the text-a-parent facility on Aladdin is used when need arises. However, home-school communication in these instances are more often than not top-down correspondences. 
The merits of setting up a school Facebook page have been discussed and acknowledged but ultimately outweighed by certain reservations from staff and management. Looking elsewhere has revealed an enormous and rapidly growing list of applications that could possibly fit the bill; Seesaw, Haiku, Remind, Class Messenger, Livingtree, SimplyCircle to name the cream that has seemingly and seamlessly risen to the top. However, the app that has piqued my interest the most and finally spurred me into some sort of action (we’re introducing it into a couple of classrooms next week) is Bloomz.
This app is growing rapidly and is rated 5-stars on AppStore. Bloomz won 2016 EdTech Digest Best New App, 2016 AASL Best website for Teaching and Learning and 2016 Tech & Learning Best of Show at ISTE. Bloomz is also the chosen Teacher-Parent Communication app in this teacher’s independent comparison of all apps recently published by SmartBrief.
Why Bloomz?
Bloomz is being recommended to schools because it is an extremely powerful tool to drive parent engagement at the schools. Bloomz’s community centric solution provides the tools to:
- Communicate with parents – use Bloomz’ instant, easy message function to communicate, share alerts and announcements.
- Share calendars and coordinate events – share school and class calendars, request RSVPs and volunteers for events and schedule parent-teacher meetings.
- Build a parent community – engage parents effectively to drive student achievement by connecting parents with teachers and other parents.
To find out more visit Bloomz.net.