I use Celly and Facebook to communicate with students and parents. We have various groups - Right now we have one for our current show, one for the group going to Nationals, one for all Thespians, etc.
Celly works like Remind. Our district signed off on it because while I can communicate privately with individual students or parents (as often needs to happen when they need to let me know that they will be late for rehearsal or whatever), it gets catalogued so that if there are ever questions in the future about our conversations, those can be provided.
For Facebook, I created a school Facebook account. I told my principal about it ahead of time and got permission. It's in my syllabus and I make it clear that while I don't use it to look at the kids' pages, if I do happen to see something that makes me think they are going to hurt themselves or someone else, or that someone is hurting them, I will report it to the proper authorities (and I have had to do that once). Then when I create a group, I add everyone in the cast and crew and their parents to it.
Between those two things, we have a pretty good communication system going.
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Laura Steenson
Theatre Director
Reynolds High School
Troutdale OR
Original Message:
Sent: 04-22-2016 11:09
From: Shira Schwartz
Subject: Direction - Student Communication
My student production team also has everyone's numbers and sends out info via mass text. The Assistant Director is responsible for the actors, The Assistant Stage Manager(s) are responsible for techies, and the Stage Manager is responsible for the cast and crew as a whole. We get all of the names and numbers on the first read through for the cast and in the interest meeting (where kids can express their preference for which crew they want to be a part of) for the crew. It's worked really well.
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Shira Schwartz
Chandler Unified School District
Chandler AZ