Friday Feed
18-19 Sawnee Tech News Vol. 3
Technology Updates and Events
Junk Mail
Barracuda is no longer being used as our email filter. The Outlook 365 filtering is now being used; however, users will have to use these directions to help teach their accounts which emails are junk and which are real.
Remind and Verizon Still at a Standstill over fees
Remind recently sent communication that users with Verizon cell providers would no longer receive text message communication via Remind. See below for the email.
We’re sorry to write with disappointing news. Recently, we learned that Verizon will be charging Remind a new fee that makes it impossible for us to continue supporting free text messaging for anyone who has Verizon Wireless as their phone carrier. Please read on for all the important details—we promise to keep this as short as we can.
What’s happening?
To offer our text messaging service free of charge, Remind has always paid for each text that our users receive or send. Now, Verizon is charging Remind an additional fee intended for companies that send spam over its network. Your Remind messages aren’t spam, but our efforts to resolve the issue with Verizon haven’t been successful.
As a result, the Verizon fee will increase our costs of providing text messaging by 11X—pushing our annual costs into the millions of dollars. This isn’t financially feasible for us to support, and it’s forcing us to end Remind text messaging for everyone who has a wireless plan with Verizon.
How will this affect you?
Beginning January 28, 2019, the people in your classes who normally get your Remind messages as texts will no longer receive these messages if they have Verizon Wireless as their phone carrier.
What can you do?
To make sure people in your classes continue receiving your messages, ask them to download the mobile app or enable email notifications—both of which are free of charge.
Additionally, our team’s working hard on a solution that allows your classes to continue to use Remind by text, and we’ll share more details with you before January 28. Text messaging will also continue to be available for organizations with a Remind School and District plan.
In the meantime, we’ll keep fighting to make sure educators, students, and parents have access to effective communication. To do this, we need your help: If using Remind has made a positive impact in your classroom, at your school, or anywhere in between, please ask Verizon to reverse the fee here: www.remind.com/verizon-fee
We’re very grateful for your support, and we’ll be in touch soon with an update.
Sincerely,
The Remind team
So, what does it all mean? Basically, if you have Verizon as a provider, you need to download the free Remind app, join our group @sawneeel and enable notifications to receive messages sent from Sawnee. The only difference is you will receive communication via the app vs your text messages.
Discovery Education Spotlight on Strategies
Here are a couple that really stood out to me:
- Half the Story is a great hook for starting a unit or lesson. View the short video to see how it works.
- Visual Walkabout is a strategy that would fit in perfectly with introducing lessons in Science or Social Studies. Click here for the pdf version of the lesson details.
- Can you guess my 2-1-4? This strategy allows students to develop some background knowledge before beginning a unit of study. Students are provided with two facts, one clue, and four pictures related to upcoming content and analyze the pieces to make predictions. Here is a board built by an educator implementing this strategy.
Login to DE via Classlink and click Streaming Plus icon on the left. Then, type in SOS in the search field to get a list of all the strategies.