Remind 101: Text Messaging for Instructors

[social-bio] How do your students do the majority of communication? The obvious answer is text messaging. Students seem to live on their phones and always have them with them; I think that we need to use this to our advantage!

Remind101 is a free service that was designed for K-12 teachers, but can easily be used in a higher education setting. It allows teachers to send messages to students in the form of a text message. The teacher simply creates an account on Remind101.com and sets up his or her class(es). The site then provides a number and a code. The students must subscribe to messages from the instructor by sending a text message to the number with the code as the message. That is all there is to it. Now the instructor is able to quickly and easily send text messages to the subscribers.

This sounds good, but I do not want my students texting me! That is the beauty of Remind101

• Everything is run through the website or Apple iOS app
• Students do not get your cell phone number
• You do not get their numbers
• You cannot send messages to individual students
• Students cannot reply to your messages
• You can schedule messages to be sent out at a later time

What type of messages would I send? Messages could range from reminders of due dates, reminders to bring certain materials to class, announcements regarding room or schedule changes, announcements regarding inclement weather, etc.

Remind101 is cleverly designed to be extremely simple and safe. Blackboard Learn, whichwe use here at the U of S does have a similar Announcement function, but it is not nearly as simple to use. I used Remind101 in the past and experienced great success.

If you would like a way to send out quick announcements or reminders to students, then look no further than Remind101.

View the video below to see exactly how it works:

Remind101 from remind101 on Vimeo.