ParentLink® Announces Teacher Reach™

LONDON, Jan. 12, 2011 - BETT - /PRNewswire/ -- ParentLink® today announced Teacher Reach, the newest member of the ParentLink family of education technology products. Teacher Reach adds specific features and functionality to the core ParentLink messaging platform that will make it easy for teachers to quickly and effectively communicate with a student's home. Designed and tested by real, working teachers who understand the need for good school-to-home communication, Teacher Reach provides a powerful yet extremely easy-to-use way for teachers to build parent partnerships and engage families.

For years, research has consistently shown that increasing parental involvement improves all areas of student activity; attendance, behavior, homework, graduation rates, etc. But until now, most teachers had to rely on notes home or the occasional phone call. Contacting each individual student's home was an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive process. But with Teacher Reach, those same teachers can instantly send pre-crafted or custom messages to all students, groups of students, or individual students—all with a single mouse click.

Speaking on the benefits of allowing their teachers to use ParentLink, Debbie Fay, Principal at Mountain View Middle School in California stated, "The messages are increasing the turn-in rate of assignments and parental involvement overall. When you do that, achievement is bound to go up." She continued, "Teachers are saving themselves time, paper, and are getting communication to and from parents in a non-threatening way. ParentLink messages are a quick way to inform parents of events, progress reports, homework and miscellaneous matters going on in the classroom." A high school teacher in New Mexico, Stephanie Miera commented, "It only took me 5 minutes to make a ParentLink call to all parents; before it would have taken me close to 8 hours. With the time I saved I was able to do what I needed to do as a teacher instead of using that time to notify parents of the meeting."

As with all of the solutions from ParentLink, Teacher Reach is a completely web-hosted solution, requiring only an Internet connection and a web browser. And Teacher Reach can integrate with any school information system currently in use, instantly putting all of the student contact data at a teacher's fingertips.

Teacher Reach includes the following modules:

• Message Library™—a collection of the most practical and impactful messages, available in multiple delivery types (phone, email, SMS text, web) and translated into the most-used languages.
• Target Messaging™—a point-and-click interface that makes it extremely easy for teachers to target students with the messages that will have the greatest impact.
• Parent TalkBack™—Teacher Reach is the only communication product on the market that allows true two-way communication between teachers and parents.
• Message Administrator™—school administrators are given complete control over the messages that are sent.
• Message Bias—teachers and administrators can monitor messages based on whether the message content is positive, neutral, or negative.
• Reports—an impressive array of reports is included, such as Parent Report, School Report, Bad Phone Numbers, Contact Report, Message Tracking, Teacher Class Report, and much more.

"We are very excited about the announcement of Teacher Reach," said John Graff, ParentLink's President. "We have been exclusively serving the K-12 education industry for more than 20 years and are proud that so many school and school districts use ParentLink to make a positive impact on student attendance and achievement. However, putting a tool like Teacher Reach in the hands of individual teachers is even more satisfying, because we know it will have a direct, positive impact on the lives of individual students."

Teacher Reach is available immediately. For more information about Teacher Reach and all of the solutions from ParentLink, please visit: http://www.parentlink.net/teacherreach.

About ParentLink®

ParentLink is dedicated to helping educators increase student achievement through superior school-to-home communication technology. ParentLink has exclusively served the K-12 market for over 20 years, providing schools with the technology needed to link principal teachers, teachers, parents, students and the community together through our web portal and messaging services. Every week, thousands of educators use ParentLink to securely send millions of messages to students, parents, and the community, in the form of phone calls, emails, SMS text messages, printed letters, and fax messages, or via the web. ParentLink helps educators improve parental outreach efforts and enjoy the benefits of increased student achievement.

SOURCE ParentLink