Barry Bakin: So hello, everybody. Welcome to yet another OTAN webinar. The topic today-- let me go ahead and get to the next one-- is Using Remind to Safely Communicate with Students.

Now of course, you can also use it to unsafely communicate with the students. But that wouldn't be very wise. And so Remind is a third party app which appears to be OK for use with students in K-12 districts throughout the country, and also with adult students. And in a nutshell, the reason is communications from the teacher to student phones are through this third party service. And so your own personal phone number is not viewed by the students. And in our district, we have restrictions against that type of communication. And I'm sure many districts do. So this provides a way to use the ubiquitous cell phone and texting apps to speak with students.

And I think people are beginning to realize, and I'm sure there's a lot of statistics out there which show, and probably anecdotally, you can verify this or not, but people respond to text messages faster than virtually any other type of communication, outside of getting hit over the head with a baseball bat. And so you get a text message, and maybe you don't actually answer, but you certainly look at your phone very quickly to see who is texting you.

And so the way this-- another reason why this became especially important for us at the LAUSD is that we had done a pretty good job. And when students enroll in our classes, pretty much everybody provides a phone number. Not everybody provides, in fact, very few people, provide an email address. And even though we were in the process of rolling out division email addresses to our adult students, we have not finished that process. In fact, we were in the middle of doing that when the schools were closed.

So the best method most people have for reaching students, especially during this time, is through cell phones. And so what this does is it not only allows you to make that first contact, but it also allows you to make additional contacts and actually provide instruction through texting and text messages. So that's what we're going to talk about today.

So the goal for this webinar is that you will be able to contact your adult education students using Remind and demonstrate a facility with the basic features of the application. So that's the basic goal. Go to Remind.com and actually sign up for an account and then start to use it to work with. So go ahead. I'm going to presume that you've done that and that you're looking at something that looks like this, the Remind home page, a very, very beautiful school somewhere in the world, and you've clicked on Sign Up.

So after having done that and you'll get these options, you can create an account from scratch, either by entering an email or a phone number. Or if you already have a Google account, you can use your existing Google account to sign up as well. And as you noticed, by signing up, you do agree to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

All right. Now what's going to happen is if you use an email to sign up, they're going to send you a four-digit code. If you use the phone number to sign up, they're going to text you that four-digit code. And they're requesting that you confirm your account by entering that four-digit code.

There is a question in the chat that I just happened to see, which says, is it OK to use work email? This is the type of thing that there could be different responses. Remind, it doesn't matter to Remind which email you use. It may matter to your work. But if you're going to use this for work, which I presume you will be, there should be no reason why you can't use it for your work email or use your work email for this purpose.

Sometimes, I'm careful about what I sign up for using a work email. Because in our district, when you retire, it's like they cut off your email before you leave the office, you know, after turning in your paper. So there may be some things that you want to keep using. You may decide, if that applies in your district, not to use a work email. Because you may lose access to it when they separate you from employment, OK?

So hopefully you've done that. And if you signed up with a phone number, there may be an extra step in that, because you signed up with a phone number, they also want you to tell them what email address you'll be using. So you may get a secondary step there if you signed up with a phone number.

And Jorge asks if there's a difference between signing up with your phone number or email. And I cannot really answer that. But I don't think that-- I don't think they would see that as a difference. To them, it's probably all the same.

Let's see. How is this app different from and or better than creating a Google Voice phone number and using that to communicate with students? I don't actually know the answer to that. I don't know what the privacy concerns are as related to Google Voice and phone. I do know that Remind integrates well with some other common programs. I'm not sure how Google Voice does. I think I'm going to leave that as something for those of you who are experts in using Google Voice to experiment with.

And the other one, what can you tell us about their Terms of Service? Does the app have access to a phone's contacts, calendar, et cetera? So that is an interesting question. Again, I'm not completely familiar with all the ramifications of that. There is an app. Students do not need the app. You may want the app so that you can respond and create and send messages as the teacher of a class or classes. But students don't need it. I imagine that they'll want something. For example, if you like to send a photo of something to your teacher-- to your students, then it would ask you for access to your photos.

Oh, and there's one more question. "When I try to reset my password, I never get the email to reset it." A common suggestion is check your spam folder. Sometimes emails like that get bumped to a Spam mailbox, OK?

So let's see. So again, my information is that they're going to send you a four-digit code. But if you get a different number, go ahead and enter that. After you do that and you-- perhaps they ask for your email address if you didn't sign up. They do want you to enter your name and create a password, OK? So hopefully, you have done that as well. And then there is a User Agreement, which they require you to Accept. If you Decline it, I imagine that you won't be able to use Remind.

And then they ask you, tell us about yourself. See, so if you said, I'm a Teacher, at that screen, I don't think it would ask you to sign up again as a teacher. But again, this is the way it looks like on a desktop. This process may look different if you're doing it on a cell phone. The very, very first time that you do sign up, if that's what you're doing, it's going to go right ahead and ask you to create a class. If you already have an account and you're just logging in again, it won't ask you that. It would just go to your Home page.

So this is where you get a chance to actually give a title to a class that you're teaching. Obviously, you want to try to make it as clear as you can. I like to put the time of the class as well as the title. And you can also include your name to make it really, really clear, OK?

So in any case, notice they do have the, I think it's the CIPA rules-- I'm not sure if I'm quoting the right acronym-- you know, about people under 13. It is OK. But then they get the parent's email involved, OK?

So this is sometimes the issue for some people. They want to identify a school. And I think they've done a pretty good job of listing huge numbers of schools. But I think what they do is they just try to match you up with an existing school here. So you may try alternative names for your school or for your district. But I do think if they actually don't find your school, then there's also an option to say, I don't see my school. And then, of course, at the very bottom there, it also says, I don't work at a school. So that could also be a legitimate option.

So we've got a few more slides to go for the sign up process so you can see I work at a school called North Valley Occupational Center. There is also, in our division, a West Valley Occupational Center. So when I was adding the school, it popped up in that fashion. Most of us know our school by the initials. And I did that the first time, and it didn't recognize us. But when I started typing out the name, it did find us. So you want to go ahead and do that, OK?

And finally, when you select the school, you click on Save. And if you've done that correctly, then right away, you go to that page of your brand new class. And it will say, Add People.

So let me speak to this a little bit. There are different ways to add people into your brand new class. And notice that one of the first things that mentions, it says, Enter Contacts or Copy and Paste from a Spreadsheet. And I notice in the Comments, some of you did try to copy and paste from Excel. But it didn't quite work out. And so you may have to experiment with comma separated values sheets and find out where the comma will go to make it if you're copying and paste. So you may want to try to do that a few times.

I think if you have the name, whether or not you do it Last Name, First Name or First Name, Last Name, and then in a separate column, the phone number, I think, if you use a .CSV, Separated Value, .CSV file, the name, and the-- you want the name, First Name, Last Name in one column, and then the Phone Number in a second column. And it automatically interprets that as being a comma between the two fields. And it should paste correctly.

So we had, at our division, we had to experiment with that a little bit. Because of-- out of our student information system, teachers can download a spreadsheet. But we did have to experiment with manipulating that spreadsheet in a way that it Remind would recognize it. But it is doable. If you have a list, I think, if you just do the Student Name and then a comma and then the Email, that would work as well. But you can also click on an individual row and manually enter student emails or phone numbers.

So that's one way. And if you notice on the left side, that this page is called Phone or Email Contacts. Now let's say that you have entered the 5 or 10 or 15 names, what will happen, as soon as you click on Add People, at the bottom of this page, a text message or email is actually sent to all of those people. And you may be surprised or you may not be, but even while you're doing that, you may start to get responses. And that's actually what happened when I was coaching an instructor through that process. Before we had even moved off of this page, he had started to get responses from students who had received his text message. So that was pretty cool.

But I'm going to, before we move on to the website live, I want to talk about the other ways to add people to a course. So if you look on the left side, it says-- the next slide says Printable PDFs, OK? So this is something that you could do if you're back in a classroom situation and you have all of your class sitting there with their phones handy. You could actually print this out or project it up on the screen, perhaps. But just print this out and have it.

So the way I would use this is after an initial attempt to get as many students in the class signed up on one day, then I would have several of these for students who were absent. And I had trained other students to help the newer students go through this process, so that anytime I got a new student, there was-- they have this page of rules or instructions. And then they could use that. So save that for sometime in the future, if and when we return to classrooms.

So this next one says "In-Person Instructions," OK? And this would actually be better if you are trying to do it in front of the class with a projector. It's much simpler, OK? And so what I thought we would actually do you, could try this right now to see how well this works. This is an experiment. I haven't actually done this in a live webinar yet. So I'm hoping it will work well.

This is an actual class that I set up for doing trainings. And the code for this class is @easycode4u. And when we get to the point about settings, I will show you how to change the computer generated, or the Remind generated code to an easy code that may be easier for your students.

So the name of this class, you see up in the upper left, is called Practice With Remind. And the code for the class is 'easycode4u'. And so what the student or what you are to do, if you so desire, for the purpose of this webinar is you're going to text the text message @easycode4u to a number, 81010.

So getting out your cell phone, if you want to participate, go to your text message program. And in the 'To' field, you type the number, 81010. And then, as the body of the message, you type @easycode4u. What's happening now is that on my own cell phone, I am receiving text messages from Remind from many, many people-- or let's say, several people, at this point-- who are joining the class. So that's a good thing. OK.

So again, go ahead continue to join the class using this method. Do note. And this was something that I did find. Some cell phones couldn't not make use of this short code, 81010. And I don't know if-- that was probably more the cell phone provider than the actual cell phone. But some providers did not like this shorter cut method.

In that case, you can see the actual phone number, the 916-303-2724 phone number. And it does the same thing. And phones seem to like that better than-- some providers seem to like that better than the short, five-digit code.

While you continue to sign up-- and thank you for doing that. It will make some of the demonstrations later also more relevant, because we can actually send messages and things to people who are actually in this class. OK.

The last way to share information is to share a link. On the left side, if you click on the 'Share a Link' menu item, what you actually see is a link that can be copied and then dropped into an email if you have an email, or post it on a website or a web page, that people can then use that link to join.

Before we go live, let me take a step back and talk about some of the account settings that you may find useful. And you'll find this menu to the upper left of the screen under your name. You click on the down arrow, and you'll see the menu Account Settings.

As part of the menu, the one that stands out right away, Notification Preferences. On this screen, you have the opportunity to decide which actual email you're going to use, or which actual phone number, and whether or not you want to enable notifications, like on your desktop computer, or not.

Or you can add other devices. So this may be something. It does mention, there is a convenient button there to tell you about downloading the mobile app if you want to go that path or not.

I have highlighted here at the very bottom, Turn on Office Hours. That may be nice. What it does is, it allows you to sort of set office hours when you're going to get messages.

But notice that, even though they'll get a warning message, they can still send the message. It will say, you know what, are you really sure you want to send this message to your teacher at 5:00 AM? So it does give them the option. Yeah, I do want to send this message to my teacher at 5:00 AM. But I think what they're saying there is, you're not obligated to answer it at 5:00 AM.

And then right above that, the other thing that you may want to think about is, do you want to allow replies to your messages? You can make this a one-way system where you're just pushing out the messages and the information and not bother with replies. You can decide whether or not that would be something that you would want to do. OK.

At this point, what I was going to do was go directly to my Remind website-- so this is my account-- and go through some of the other features. Again, this is my Remind website. This is the Add People page for Practice with Remind, which is the name of this class.

For the moment, I'm done adding people. When I click on Close, we go back to the page for this class. At the top, you'll see four different tabs. Let me go through them.

This is a log of all the messages. And right away, you can see that lots of people-- the primary message says, this person joined the class. That basically only happens once. Now, as you go through, you see some are in bold. And that's an actual message. So not only did they join the class, they actually typed a message.

Now, over here on the left, you actually see that, in this class, there are eight new messages that have not been responded to. So what I can do is, I can click on that one message from that one person. I'm just going to say back, "Hello and welcome."

And you can do this with your students. And then send a message, and wherever Gina is located, she's actually going to get a new message back on her phone. Again, you can go down and look at the list of messages, click on a message, and respond.

This is where you keep track of the messages for this class. And it may be helpful, for those of you who didn't go through this process, to just spend a minute to talk about what you saw.

But basically, you get a text message that says, your teacher-- this is a message from Remind from some unknown phone number. They're not going to know-- you're not going to recognize the phone number, OK? But your teacher is asking you to join the class.

And then, when you want to join the class, basically, you say yes. And then it asks you, well, what's your full name? And so the student writes the name. And then it also asks them to decide if they're a student or a parent. OK?

And for adult students, this is sometimes confusing because they're both. And it doesn't really matter. In other situations, in K12, it does matter a little bit, because they differentiate between K12 students and their parents.

And when we get into the settings, there is a setting which prevents-- if you want-- people from communicating with anybody outside of their role. And so if the person is the parent, you can block them from speaking or sending a text message directly to a student, and vice versa.

Now, it may be true that some of you who already have Remind accounts in the past, which you signed up for as teachers, when you come into this new classroom, or if you signed in just now, Remind automatically identifies you as a teacher. In any case, this is the sending the message page.

Over here under Files, pretty much, this is what it says. All of the files that you shared to your class will appear here. So if you want to send out a Word document, it would say Send a File, and then you could go through that process. We can try that later.

People. That was the page we were already at. Under this view, you see a list of all the people who have joined the class. If you want to add more, then on the upper right, you select Add People. And then the Settings page. And we'll get into that next. But that's where you would change the settings.

But let's go back to the Messages page and look at some of our options. So the Send a Message text box is at the bottom right. And the default is, message everyone in the class.

So message everyone, in practice, with Remind. Basically, just click. The very first message just says, welcome to Practice with Remind. Welcome to the class. I'm looking forward to using Remind to share updates, notes, and more. Thanks for joining.

The key thing here is, on the right, it says minus 6. I think that means there's too many characters. Let's see what happens if we delete some characters. OK. So at this point, if I click Send, everybody who's joined the class should now get that message.

Let's see what happened. OK. So I got a message that said, message was sent. And right away, it goes back to the Message screen, and it tells me that this was the message that I sent, and I sent it to everyone. That means that all of you right now should be receiving another text message.

Now, notice that you may also know-- who does that message come from? It still comes from that number that you don't know. At this point, you may want to suggest to your students that they save this number in their own phone books as a message from their favorite teacher. See?

That way, they know that that message that's coming in, that text message, is actually coming from you and not from some strange number. So they can say text message is from Mr. Bakin. All right. That's one thing to do with sending messages to everyone.

You will notice at the bottom that there are a few other things that you can do. Here's a photo. I'll just say, please write a sentence about this photo. And of course that's an ESL-type instruction. You're probably all teaching different things. But see, right away, there's the attachments. Add to your message.

So let's say Upload a Photo or Video. And so you do want to find your particular item that you wanted. Here's some photos. I'm going to select a photo. And it takes a few seconds for it to load into the message. And then I could send that.

But instead of just sending it out randomly, here's a cool little feature which could be useful for some of you, the Translate feature. And they give you this little menu. See? So for example, if you wanted to translate into another language, it automatically does it for you. Tinush, can you verify if their translation is decent? Yes, it is. OK.

Let's do a Russian version. Russian. So, Paulina, how's the automatic translation? It looks OK, see? It's not great. And again, in an ESL class, obviously our goal is to do more English language, but there could certainly be some times when you may want to make use of this feature.

Again, back in our division, we're trying to get students to activate their school district emails, and it is a convoluted process. And so it may be very convenient to be able to do something like this. And anyway, to get back to English, I'll go back to English.

Here's a picture. Please write an offer. I don't remember. Please write a sentence-- oh, you know what? I bet you that was a reverse translation. In Portuguese or something, it must have had a different word. So translating back from Portuguese to English. Please write a sentence about this photo. OK. So that's one option.

I'm going to send everybody in the class a picture now of one of the schools I work at, East Valley Skills Center. Let's see how that's working. And there you go. And then, again, you see the picture of what was sent out as a text message.

This is the message that I sent. If you click on that little arrow to the right-- this is a little bit of a digression-- it gives you some statistics. So 93%-- well, let's say 100% of the people in this class got the message, and 93% actually looked at it.

That could be very helpful to know, are they paying attention to what I'm sending them? Because at least here, I know that 42 of you out of 45 actually opened the message and saw it. That's pretty cool. So you can know, well, did they never see it, or did they see it and simply ignore it?

Let's look at some of these other ones. Can I translate into English a message a student sends to me in their native language? I don't know. I don't know if that's possible within Remind, but you could certainly copy and paste.

Does a student need to download the app to receive and send messages? No. For them, they're just text messages. Some names were automatically added that are not part of my class. They are from the local high school. OK.

So I guess your district has an account, and so some people were added to your class. Let's take a look. Let's just get out of the questions for a second. If I go to People, and there's a bunch of people, right?

Let's say, if I click on Otan Techy, I get this little menu. Can everybody see that? And so on the right side, this is that person. There's more actions. And if I clicked on More Actions, I have one-- Remove from Class, which would boot Otan Techy out of this class.

Block User. I'm not actually sure-- the ramifications of that. But I don't know if it just blocks users from me or from Remind totally. That would be a good question for Remind. And then, boy, report to Remind. Gee, I'm tempted to do that. That Otan Techy is probably some spam account, if you ask me. But anyway, that's what you could do.

Let's get back to the Q&A real quickly. Can students send images and videos to the group? I think so, but I'm not going to promise you that they can. Of course, before doing something like that, you would want to remind everybody that everything that they do can be viewed by you. And so they should be aware of that. Yeah, they don't want to be using this for private liaisons. OK.

Jesse, you say, that window isn't what I have. Nothing on the right. I can text everybody, but can't access that column. Let me go back to the messages. At the very bottom, in your message bar, where it says Message Everyone in Practice with Remind, to the right, Jesse, do you see the camera and the paperclip?

If you click on the paperclip, then you get that message bar. You get this window where you can add other things. If you just start typing-- let's see. Well, it doesn't even let me just start typing. It pops up.

But this may be a good opportunity before we go back to the question and answer. We chose to upload a photo or video. You can also, at this time, just upload a file. It opens up your explore your file explorer and you can select the file.

Notice that it links to Google Drive. If you click on Google Drive-- and most likely, the very first time that you do this, it's going to ask you for permission to link to your Google Drive, and you probably have to sign in to your Google Drive with your password.

But right here, you have a list of your most recent files. You can attach whatever that file is automatically through this attachment system. If I want my students to read my weekly update, I can just click on it, and it will appear in the message.

Now, notice, it is also a link-- or it appears as a link. And so I would imagine that you'd have to make sure, before you do that, that you set the permissions on your Google Drive so that people can view it. You can get rid of it by clicking on the X.

But if you go back to that menu, you may use some of these other third-party services. The first time, you see it's got the little plus symbol, which means you probably have to give it permission. But some of you, if you're using Google Forms for quizzes or for assessments, you could do that through Google Drive.

Some of you may be familiar with Survey Monkey. If you're using Survey Monkey, it very conveniently looks for your most recent surveys. And you could attach those. That's pretty convenient. So those are the attachments.

Now, the other thing is, notice here your character count. In your messages to the whole class, you are limited to 140 characters. And it counts it down. As you start typing, the characters count down.

There are some workarounds if you want to send a message with a greater number of characters. So one of those is, you write your message a document and then you attach the document. But another nice little workaround is, you can divide your class into groups. And then they don't have that same character limit.

The pencil icon at the top allows you to set up your message in general. Notice, if you write a message this way, it's not limited to the Practice with Remind course. I could actually send the same message to multiple courses. See?

And then they have this other section called Group Conversations. I made a group of just me and myself in the past, to practice it. So it remembers it. That way, if you have a team of people working on a project, and you create a group just for that team, then it's easy to come back to that team.

But you can also select Create New. And it says, start the dialogue with up to nine other people. You could go through the list and pick any nine, and then create a new group. OK, so there is the new group. And then you continue to write a message to that group.

And then notice, now, the character limit is significantly higher. Your message can be much, much longer-- 1500 characters. So that could be a workaround if you find that your 140 characters isn't sufficient.

Let's go back to the Q&A and see if I got everything. Do I need to invite them again to join Remind? Could it be that they deleted the app if they got it? I'm not exactly sure what the setup is for that.

Melinda Holt: The students were-- they all started using Remind, and a month into it, everybody stopped responding. Or, only one or two respond still.

Barry Bakin: Oh. Well, I do not know what the reason for that would be. Maybe they're no longer interested in participating and there's nobody to enforce that. What can I say? Or maybe they changed their phone numbers.

But maybe take a look at the-- remember, we said over here, this right arrow-- let's say you have a message. Then, to the right, you can see how many people read the message compared to how it was delivered. So that could help. But I don't know that-- if they're using the app, then I think it would still go to just their text messaging.

Bev asked how many people are allowed in a group. I think it was nine. Is there a way to keep students from seeing each other, or keep their names confidential? Sign up with a different name? That I don't know. Does attaching a file or photo use Remind message space? It does not appear to affect the number of characters.

How can you add content without using space in the message? OK. Again, [audio out] just try one. Here's my message. I'm going to say Test Message. And I'm down to 128 characters. If I upload a file-- here's a Word document. I'll open it.

And it may take time for documents to load. But it did look like it dropped my characters down to 105. But that doesn't seem, to me, to be significant. But again, you have any concerns about that, I would say, divide your classes up into groups.

Let's get back to the Q&A. And how do I send a picture from my phone to my Remind file? The file is linked to my computer, not my phone number. I would maybe just send the phone to your email.

And then, wherever your email is, you open your email on your computer and download or upload them to your computer so you can attach the picture. That would probably be one workaround. Or you upload the picture to your Google Drive, or some other Cloud service, and send it from there.

Let's look at a few more of the settings. Right here, notice the class name was Practice with Remind, but you can go right in and change it if you want to. You know, More Practice with Remind. But this next section is where you change the class code.

If, in your class, it's got one of those-- three digits, and then a letter, and then four or more digits, you just click in the box and change it. But notice, they have one of these artificial intelligence-type things that says, whoops, this one is unavailable. They give you some suggestions, or you just keep typing until it makes sense. And then notice-- let's say, I'll do easy code 10.

When I save it, you get a little pop-up. Are you sure? Current participants won't be affected because you're already in, but new participants must use this code to join your class. So you can accept or not.

Then there is the name of the school that this one is associated with. And they give you a little reminder here. This school doesn't have a Remind plan-- which I am sure costs money, and your school may or may not wish to spend money.

But you can still-- notice, it tells me how many more classes I have. You can create five more classes with your free account. I already have one, two, three, four, five. So it looks like they give you up to 10 classes.

As we go down, though, I'm just going to skip right by this next part, because at the very bottom, it says Archiving. Reuse class code. So you can archive this class and create a new class with the same class code. So if you really like that easy code for you, you could keep it. You can also just remove the class, and it no longer appears in your class list.

I have, over here on the left side-- so remember, I have five more classes. If I go to this other practice class called the Technology Workshop, and I go to Settings, and I go down and I say Archive the Class-- are you sure? I'm going to remove it because I don't need it.

Now, I'll go back to my Practice with Remind class, go back to Settings, and if the magic worked-- see? Now I have six more classes that I can create, by archiving a class that I didn't really need.

Some other settings. Class visibility. This class will appear in class search and on your profile. On is fine. Require approval to join. Notice that it does say anyone added by your school will be approved automatically. That may have related to the other issue of the person who said that they had students in their class that they don't know where they came from.

Participant messaging. This is where you can choose how the participants see and message others in the class. So the default is role-based, meaning students can only message students. Parents can only message parents. In my class, typically, we don't have that type of combination. So I just say, all participants in the class can message each other.

For the one participant who asked about not seeing the other people, you may want to select Off. And that way, they can only message the class owners, and can't see other kids in the class. So that may be the solution there. And then, by default, I will only message people 13 or older. Presuming that most of us are working in an adult school, I think that's safe to keep.

Class owners can see and send messages to class participants. Once somebody becomes a class owner, they cannot be removed. So be careful who you welcome to your little club.

Let me drop back in now to the Q&A and the chat. Let's see. The question is, so when a student graduates and leaves my class, can I still keep them in a list for the communication to continue, or should I place them in a group so they do not get assignments, just info or greetings?

I'm not actually sure. Perhaps you can-- if you have extra classes, you could create a class called Former Students, and then you put all of the-- those students into that group.

And then if you remember, when we were looking at an individual student name, click on the student name, you get this other little menu on the side. Well, let's see. Let's see. View Profile. There was a way to-- oh, Add to Another Class. So you can switch them to the new class that you've made on your own.

That's what's messaging. The last thing that we should cover is this Create a Class. Again, when you joined, you created your first class. Now we're going to-- you need to create a new class. Basically, you click on Create a Class, and then you choose. Class name. OK.

Oh, that's a very difficult class code, so I'm going to just say, Tech4UNow. OK. I like that. And then, notice, it didn't let you type too many. The class code can't be too long. This is the school. I'll change it over to North Valley Occupational Center. Yes.

And I create my-- oh, you know what? Maybe when I switched classes it erased the class name. So what about TechTalks? OK. And I'll create it. So there you go.

Right now, I don't have any members in the class. You know how to add members. Click on People, then click on Add People, and then you have the four methods. Adding from the spreadsheet. You can type a name. Sorry. That would be the phone number.

And then, boom. Add the people, and they get a text message. When you're done with that, you can close it. And so you have the same thing. But now there's a new class here, Tech Talks. It's pretty simple.

We're almost at the end of today's webinar. The only other thing that I would say, if you click under your name, the Help Center is very helpful. They've got a lot of-- they have an FAQ. You can chat with a computer. They have other resources.

"If you will finish the class for this school year, do I need to keep the class with the same students?" I think that we saw that you can archive. And that way, it doesn't-- you're not worried about it.

"I entered in about 40 names. Let's say 10 do not respond. I will need to add or invite them again. There is no place to access the students I invited but did not accept." Well, let's see. Let's go back to that.

You added people. I think that, for example, if you-- you would just want to keep a record of the ones that you requested. And just keep a spreadsheet, and then you can compare the spreadsheet with who's actually in the class. But I do not know if there's a way to see that from within Remind.

"Can you remind us-- cute-- how it will work when we send the class code to students by way of email?" If you send it by way of email, they probably would click on a link in a browser, and then it would ask them to join the class. But I'm not actually sure, because I've always done it with phone numbers.

Let's see if there's anything in the chat box that needs to be reviewed. Yeah. There doesn't seem to be a way to see who are potentially-- I would say work off of your own spreadsheet or take screenshots.

"Remind messages can't be edited or deleted once they've been sent. This is similar to other texts, emails, and messages you send. Although participants can delete texts from their phones, these messages will still appear in the Remind message history."

That's great advice. And just like when you are working on your phone with a couple of people who you're texting using your text messaging, and then you've got somebody else on Messenger, and then maybe you have somebody on WhatsApp, it's pretty much a good idea nowadays to double-check, before you click Send, that you're sending that message to the correct people. You can avoid a lot of embarrassment that way.

Let's see. So Paulina says, "When I invite people, I usually type in the name and the phone number that is on the roster I have access to through the school." So again, yeah, that's sort of-- you're keeping track in your own fashion.