Last year I featured a school-to-parent communication service called SchoolCircle. Over the summer SchoolCircle changed its name to SimplyCircle and added some helpful new features.

At its core SimplyCircle is a free service that is designed to help elementary school teachers organize communication to the parents of their students. SimplyCircle offers many of the features of Google+ Communities without the need for parents to join Google+.

Through SimplyCircle you can create an online community for parents of students in your classroom. You can use SimplyCircle to send messages, organize tasks for parent-volunteers, and post updates about things happening in your classroom and in your school. Parents don’t have to sign into SimplyCircle daily because you can choose to send a daily digest of updates to their email addresses.

Just in time for the new school year SimplyCircle added some new features included an integrated calendar that teachers can use to plan and organize events for multiple groups in one place. SimplyCircle added a one-click volunteer sign-up function. The volunteer function includes the option to send reminders and details about volunteer responsibilities. And you can now send individual messages to parents instead of just group messages.

Learn more about SimplyCircle in the video embedded below.