This will be a short post of how I plan to manage and keep track of my parent contact this year. To get started I have created a Google Form with a link and QR code that will go home with all students on the first day of school to gather parent contact information. I do have some information through PowerTeacher, but I prefer to use information given by the parents. I am using Zapier to automatically take any responses on my Google Form and create a Trello card for each student. Each card will have the names of the parents, e-mail/phone and preferred contact method.
Trello
What I like about Trello is that I can use labels on my student cards for things such as sports, IEP/504, ESOL, clubs, etc. This gives be a quick overview about each student and things that I need to be aware of. From the Google Form as stated above, each card will have details of the parent contact for each student. In Trello I will use the comment function to log my parent contact. The comment will automatically log the date and time that I made the comment and I can comment about the specific date and time. In Trello you can move the card within each list. My plan is to move the cards to the bottom if I have recently contacted a parent so that I can continually contact parents throughout the semester. For parents that I need to contact more frequently, say on a weekly basis, I can have a list of just those students. I really like how open Trello is as an organizational tool. I hope to use Trello not just to record parent contact, but to better track my students and any interventions that I am doing with students.
Manna Math 