Saving Trees,Time, and Privacy: The Paperless Parent/Teacher Contact Log

Would you dare give your students and their parents your cell or home phone number if it would save you time, paper and you could still maintain your privacy?

While no one would want to sacrifice their privacy for their environmental conscientiousness, now you can reconcile both. Divulging your cell or home phone numbers using Google Voice can give you the peace of mind that you are doing so to empower yourself as a teacher and transform how you communicate with parents. 

Google Voice allows you to create a paperless parent contact communication log saving you from countless hours of alphabetizing hundreds of student contact information sheets in clunky binders, and the stress of documenting difficult parent messages and conversations. 

Google Voice is a one stop shop with many parent/teacher communication features providing both written and verbal documentation any teacher can use for his/her parent contact documentation needs.

Here's how Google Voice works:

First, set up a Google account;  then, go to Google Voice and set up a Google Voice account. Google Voice will give you one phone number, and you can give this phone # to parents to call you. Parents NEVER SEE your original number; however, parent calls are transcribed and saved as emails for documentation of day/time of contact. 

One of my favorite features is that you can also send/receive texts to parents and students for reminders of tests, quizzes, HW, projects, important events, dates and more all while keeping your phone number private. Parents and students can never claim they were not informed of an important date because, like emails, there is a written record of who sent and received a message.  You can also set a specific time frame in the evening for students or parents to send you texts asking questions as well. These texts are also archived in Google Voice! 

Google Voice Gives Teachers A New Voice In The Classroom! 

If you set up your gmail contacts with pictures of your students and their parents’ email addresses, you can also see who is calling you on Google Voice, but best of all, you can send “blast” emails to your students’ parents.  Google Voice has so many more "teacher friendly"features to empower and transform your parent/teacher communication! I hope you'll check them out!