The popular text messaging service Remind 101 rebranded this week by dropping the “101” from its name. The announcement was made on the Remind blog yesterday. The announcement doesn’t explain why “101” was dropped from the name. The good news is that nothing else has changed. All of the great features that we’ve come to love about Remind 101 are still present in Remind. If you are using the iOS or Android apps, you will not have to re-install anything.

For those who are not familiar with it, Remind is a free service that allows you to send text messages to groups of students and or parents from your computer, your iPhone, or your Android phone. The benefit of using Remind 101 over Google Voice, which I used to use for this purpose, to text students and parents is that your phone number is not revealed and your students’ cell phone numbers are not revealed to you. Students and parents have to opt-in if they want to be added to your text messaging list. Students and parents have to enter a confirmation code to state that they do want to be contacted by you through the service.

Remind lets you schedule messages to be sent. For example, if you are planning to take your students on a field trip on Friday you can schedule a reminder message to be sent to all parents on Thursday evening. Your message could contain reminders about what to pack for the field trip and an emergency contact number to use during the field trip.

The attachment option in Remind allows you to add pictures and other files to your messages. You can even pull files from your Google Drive or Dropbox account to send as attachments. If you’ve ever sent a text message with an attachment then the process will feel very familiar to you.

Applications for Education
Most of us can’t help but look right away when we receive text messages. Compare this to email messages that we can easily ignore and you’ll know why sending text message reminders is more effective than sending email reminders.