3 min read
Teachers and professors get a lot of communication and noise from students. This student has a question about an assignment. That one needs an unexpected extension on a deadline. Worse, if you make an error or leave ambiguous wording on an assignment or slide, students may inundate your mailbox with the same request over and over again.
How can you cut through the noise and decrease the time you have to spend on student communications while simultaneously maintaining a relationship with your students and ensuring that you get out the information they need? Pronto is here to help.
Effortlessly organize your communications, eliminate noise
Some emails or messages from students require an immediate response: students are in the midst of an emergency or crisis, and they need you to get back to them fast to prevent future problems. Other messages, on the other hand, can wait.
Still, others may allow you to send a one-time announcement or form a response that will cover all the issues raised by several students all at the same time, in one easy email or communication.
Pronto makes it easy to organize your messages, and cut through all the noise. You can sort them according to which student is getting in touch with you, set aside specific communications that you might need for later student documentation, or easily group student messages that cover the same general content so that you can easily refer back to them later if needed.
Send out one-way communications and announcements.
Sometimes, you may want students to receive a specific message, but not want them to reply to you. You certainly don’t want them to reply to the entire class, creating a flood of communications that could frustrate everyone. With Pronto, you can set up one-way communications that will allow you to send out messages to all of your students–or all of the students in a specific class or category–without enabling a fast reply to that message. Often, this can help students slow down, take a look at the information in front of them, and determine whether they need to send out an email response, or whether whatever question they have has already been answered in the initial communication.
Set up specific “office hours.”
In today’s always-connected society, many teachers and professors feel as though they are constantly fighting the noise: fielding requests and communications from their students–and if they don’t answer back quickly, their students can quickly grow frustrated by that lack of response. With more students than ever schooling in a virtual environment, teachers and professors may no longer feel as though they can restrict communications to the hours they usually spend in the office, waiting to see if students have any issues they need to deal with. While you want to be available to your students when necessary, you also deserve downtime: time that is focused on your family, your hobbies, or your need to relax instead of on your students and their needs.
Set clear office hours that establish when you’re available and when students can expect to get a response back from you. You can check in periodically and deal with any immediate “emergencies” without having to sacrifice your self-care.
Set up groups inside Pronto.
Pronto allows for the creation of groups to help facilitate conversations between students. Whether you’re dealing with a virtual or in-person classroom setting, those groups can serve several critical purposes for both you and your students. First, they help break some of the noise barriers to communication by opening the door for students to easily ask questions of one another or share information without having to specifically contact a single classmate. Second, they facilitate open discussion, which can help many students obtain a better, higher-level understanding of the material you’re covering in class.
Those groups also serve a critical purpose for you: they can make it easier for students to get answers to their questions from one another, rather than having to wait for you to send a response. You might not be online or checking the app at two in the morning, but if a student has a question at that hour, another student might be online to help–especially if they’re dealing with a tight deadline or finishing up a project.
Pronto is designed to make life easier for teachers by streamlining communication and adding a more human touch. When you use Pronto for your classes, you’ll find that it helps create a connection between your students and you, and between your students and one another, making it easier for you to cut through the noise and address any barriers to your student’s learning.