TEACHERS | TalkingPoints

I am a third year science teacher in a 100% English Language Learner campus. This means 100% of my students come to our campus with zero English and learn English while at my school. That presents a different challenge when trying to communicate with parents important information from our school. This app translates to Spanish and Swahili (which is primarily what is spoken at our campus) and it is so helpful to communicate with families!! This is an absolute game changer and life saver. I would recommend this app to anyone who likes the idea of the Remind app, but needs it to be accessible to ALL parents. My only complaint is that it doesn’t have access to all languages, but I think that would come with time as they become more known with time.

I have used Talking Points this past school year to communicate with parents of English learners and it’s been the most parent-teacher communication I’ve had. Some parents mentioned that the translation is confusing and in same cases they preferred English, but overall, it has been very very handy! I definitely recommend it to any teachers, but especially those in ESOL. I’ve had only 2 challenges with it: A. Many times I can tell that I’ve gotten messages but they do not load on my IPhone. Most school days I leave the website open on my work laptop for quick texting with the parents, but if I want to see the messages on my phone, sometimes I can’t read them. B. Sometimes I receive a message that appears as 2 lines long and I think I’ve read what the parent said. At random times, I’ve clicked on the parents’ original message (some languages I understand) and discovered That their message was actually much longer, and a good part of it never got translated.

I am a kindergarten teacher and have used this app for 2 years now. It has been a gift with being able to communicate with my parents. I love that there are options to translate messages into my parents’ home languages. There are so many benefits to this app...sharing pictures, read receipts, polls, sending classes to other teachers (PE or Music teacher), and sending messages at a later time is one of my favorites features. I would highly recommend this app. I was able to teach myself how to use it pretty quickly and it’s user friendly!

Talking points has allowed me to send many messages to multilingual families as we are working from home. The translations are not always 100% accurate especially when a parents literacy in their home language is not very strong. However it has allowed me to make many more connections with parents in a quick and efficient manner.

ask user to change the rating

This app is great for communicating with parents across all languages. But, there are a few shortcomings with the user experience: (a) there is no way to mass delete messages (I.e. student enrollment notifications and parent messages) so it is hard to keep a clean inbox; (b) when using an Apple Keyboard, the app doesn’t support landscape mode; (c) intermittently the Student/Parent profile screen do not display; and (d) the compose message screen could be made more intuitive and easier to begin an individual message. Great service, but I think improvements are needed with the app functionality!