bloomz.com ■ Retail Price: Free for parents, teachers, and administrators. Upgrades available to unlock premium functionality.
Quality and Effectiveness: Bloomz is an app that enables teachers to connect, coordinate, and communicate with parents, other teachers, and administrators. It’s secure, simple, and can replace other, time-consuming communication tools. With Bloomz teachers can share updates, maintain calendars, arrange sign-ups, post media, and manage contacts. They can schedule conferences online, for example, and exchange communication with individual parents beforehand if needed. Bloomz enables teachers to share photos of field trips and class events and add student work to timelines and portfolios as well. They can also invite administrators to the class. Users can communicate via a post (e.g., what’s happening today), an announcement (e.g., who won the award), or alerts (e.g., school is getting out early) that can be pinned to the top of the page to draw parents’ attention to such important items. Teachers can also coordinate with parents on events (e.g., a class picnic), either as a group or individually.
Ease of Use: After downloading Bloomz from Google Play or the App Store, or by using the desktop site, teachers can create an account easily and form a class. Teachers can invite parents to the class manually or create a class access code. Even parents who aren’t enrolled with an account receive updates through email. There’s a complete guide to getting started, with a 36-minute video walk-through, as well as quick in-app tutorials, teacher resources, and a comprehensive support site as well. Users can also follow Bloomz on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with updates, news, events, and resources. Bloomz makes it simple for teachers to:
■ allow a room parent to take over tasks, giving them limited access to part of the program
■ communicate behavior management information to parents on individual students (for negative and positive reasons)
■ publish school and class calendars
■ manage events like school trips, class projects, and holiday parties
■ quickly manage and schedule meetings or conferences, with parent feedback
■ set reminders for deadlines.
Creative Use of Technology: Bloomz combines and integrates the functions of many different tools in one effective, easy-to-use app. From updating a profile picture to maintaining an interactive calendar, teachers can use Bloomz to streamline often difficult, time-consuming communication with parents.
Suitability for Use in a School Environment: Bloomz allows teachers to have two-way communication with parents, as they can chat online. Teachers can also give parents access to chat with other parents to set up carpools or playdates. Organizing classroom activities like conferences helps teachers save time and involves parents in the process, so the communication can be ongoing. Bloomz also allows teachers to combine lots of simple but important tasks such as sending out posts, announcements, or alerts.
OVERALL RATING:
This outstanding, easy-touse app enables teachers to communicate many pieces of classroom information to parents, easily and effectively.
TOP FEATURES
• Simple, downloadable app that’s easy to set up.
• Saves teachers time by combining many tasks in one place.
• Increases comprehensive communication with parents.
