Advice About Parent Accounts

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Hi guys,

I've been using Classcraft for years now.  I've never used the parent accounts and just kept it as something we use in class with our time together.  Anyone had experience using the parent accounts?  How have you used them?  Any advice?  Should I just keep it in the class setting or do you think I'm missing something special by not using the parent accounts?  Would love to hear from the community.  Any advice and shared experiences would be helpful!  Thanks, everyone!

6 comments
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Hi Arrash! 

I LOVE using the parent accounts. It gives me an easy way to stay in contact with them and they love being able to see their student’s avatar and progress. I always sell this to kids at the beginning by making sure they know if their parents sign up, they get the free pets and their parents can give them gold for things they do at home. 

To get it set up, I have the kids take home their info sheet I print for them when we are setting up our classes (I can’t use Google Classroom, so I have to manually enter them). After about a week, any parents who haven’t signed up, I send them an email explaining the program and inviting them. 

Any time I send out a class announcement to students, I also push it out to all parents so they are kept in the loop. Because I already have Classcraft and our LMS, I didn’t want to add something else (like Remind) for staying in contact. 

So far, I’ve had really great feedback from parents about this feature. They like feeling included and being able to encourage at home tasks with the gold pieces. 

I hope this help! If you ever need anything, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @TechWithParson!

Thanks, Arcadia!  I'll add you on Twitter.  That helps a lot.  I'm a little new to the forums here, I didn't realize we had such a great teacher community!  I'll try this out next year. :) 

If anyone has more advice, I'd love and welcome it.  Thanks, all!

Hey Arrash! 

Arcadia hit all the great points of using Parent accounts in your classroom. I have parents who love the feature of giving gold pieces at home, and I have some that just want it for announcements. If you are using Quests, parents can track progress on those. One of the other features I have gotten feedback on is that parents love being able to see any sentences that their child gets, as they can have a conversation at home. 

In terms of buy in-telling students they get free pets and can earn gold seems to get them very interested. I haven't required all students to have a parent account, but would definitely recommend it if you are looking into it! 

Gave out parent codes to students this Friday.  Figured it would be a good thing to try at the end of the year to see if we like it.

Parents accounts are great. . I was also using them to post pictures that I took in the classrooms.  I was having some trouble with parents viewing the pictures and the ease at which to take and post them.  I would like to have all of my parent communication in one easy, convenient place.  Sometimes it's tough because parents don't have the right settings on their phone to receive notification when a message is sent.  I've sent out messages before and parents have said they don't get them until they sign into classcraft.  Having it work like a text message would be great so it pops right up on their phone.  

This seems too good to be true!  Are there any downsides to having parent accounts set up?

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