Recently we sat down with Karyn Frack, who teaches pre-k at Yowell Elementary School in Culpeper Virginia.

"This is my 16th year teaching pre-K, and I was always very "old school" about how I did things, so when people started using ClassDojo or Remind... I was like, "no, I'm not doing that with parents. No, I'll send notes and whatever" then COVID hit, and suddenly we had to do a lot more digital communication, so we decided to try Bloomz that year. I wanted to dip my toes in the water and experiment a little bit.

But I liked it enough that last year I did go ahead and use it regularly, and it was phenomenal with the parent communication. I love the ability to send messages and photos to parents, and I love not having to wait for that piece of paper to come back in a folder (or wonder if they even checked the piece of paper in the folder.) I just think that in this day and age, I needed to change my mindset because people are more digital now. Bloomz is a great platform to communicate with parents, but I chose Bloomz for a few different reasons.

I liked the ability to send pictures, I liked the ability to post to the class, or have private messaging, but I also liked some of the features that it had that other platforms didn't like being able to do class sign-ups for parties. Last year for the first time, we scheduled all our parent-teacher conferences that way. And wow, what a fantastic thing that parents could pick their times, and I didn't have to collect all the papers back and try to figure out a schedule. It was amazing!

Ultimately, that cemented it for me, that - yes, this is the platform I want to use. I liked it so much that it was worth upgrading this year and spending some of my school funds to get the upgraded version.

I have compared Remind and ClassDojo to Bloomz, and I looked at ClassTag too. The Bloomz platform was straightforward for teachers and parents to use and offered the most tools. The conference and class sign-up feature, the SMS messaging, the pictures, Bloomz was the "DoItAll" solution! I was afraid to go digital, but I will never go back now that I have found Bloomz - and as much as I love it, my parents love it even more.

Parents love getting those pictures of their kids because, often, especially with the little ones, they'll go home and say, what did you do today? Or how was your day? And the kids say, "I don't know," or they don't get much out of them. So just sending those pictures with the little messages and the captions help them get a glimpse into what their kids are doing here at school. I love Bloomz!