Please use the key below to identify which group of stakeholders the below updates apply to:
💓 = update for families
✏️ = update for teachers + non-rostered staff
🎒 = update for school admins
🎒✏️ Message Mentor: To help teachers and school staff build their capacity in family engagement communication best practices, TalkingPoints is introducing the Message Mentor. Message Mentor is like a built-in helper that allows teachers to level up their family messages with a click of a button. Teachers and staff can choose spelling and grammar check, revision recommendations based on best practices, and even start a message from scratch.
🎒 NEW Analytics Dashboard: The new dashboard allows partners to drill down into key data to help them access and utilize key data they need to track and drive usage of the TalkingPoints platform in support of their family engagement goals.
🎒 Admin Mobile App Beta Improvements: Considering that urgent situations are when admins are most likely to be away from their desks, we added the 'Treat as urgent' functionality to the admin mobile app.
🎒 Admin Mobile App Beta: Admins may not always be in their office when they need to send a message to their school community. The Admin Mobile App Beta allows both school and district level admins to send school-wide messages on the go.
🎒✏️💓 Left Chat Contact Status: Family contacts can now leave a single conversation with a staff member or the school while staying connected to TalkingPoints to continue receiving important district, school, or classroom information.
🎒 Staff Statuses: To prepare for the new and improved analytics dashboard release this summer, TalkingPoints has removed the staff status column.
🎒 Staff Management: TalkingPoints has released staff management features to get ready for the end of the year and prepare for summer school or the new school year.
See which staff members need to be manually maintained in TalkingPoints by using the "roles updated via" filter in the staff tab. Download this report if necessary.
🎒 End-of-Year Rollover Guidance:Here is guidance for how to roll-over your TalkingPoints accounts, including actions to clean up data from the 23-24 school year as well as how to prepare for the 24-25 school year. We estimate this will take a minimum of 1 hour.
🎒✏️ Easily attach files to any message: You asked, we listened! Our yearly survey revealed that the ability to drag and drop files into messages would greatly improve usability for all staff on TalkingPoints. Drag and drop or cut and paste files directly into any message at the district, school, and teacher levels.
💓 Choosing a preferred communication method: Family contacts receive messages through SMS text by default, but have the option to download and use the free TalkingPoints for Families app. To make it easier for them to switch between methods, if necessary, we have added a clarifying button in the app to switch back to text messaging. Read how families can switch from the TalkingPoints for Families app to SMS text.
🎒 Staff & Roles:In an effort to always improve ease of use on the TalkingPoints platform and prepare for the ability to create custom roles (coming in Fall 2024), we have updated 'Staff' to show 'Staff & Roles'. Changes include three tabs to navigate:
Staff: The staff tab may look familiar. It is a list of all of your staff and their roles, filterable by class, group, or role.
Roles: The roles tab gives you a quick snapshot of how many staff members are assigned to which role, as well as a description of each role's permissions.
Permissions: The permissions tab lets you see a side-by-side comparison of the permissions in our base roles.
Please bear with us. As we make big changes in our platform, it takes time for us to update all of our screenshots in older articles. Rest assured that the information in our articles is accurate and that our team is hard at work to make changes to support you.
🎒 .csv uploader partner data management improvements: We have enabled the ability to delete students directly from the TalkingPoints platform to support our .csv uploader partners with managing their data.
🎒✏️💓 Support for non-MT languages: To help reach families who speak languages where machine translation does not yet exist, our human translation team has pre-translated our in-app templates to convey common communications. Our newest addition is Navajo.
🎒✏️💓 Learner role: We have added a 'learner' relationship designation for any students who are uploaded using our .csv uploader or manually added to the platform. We have also removed the 'self' relationship and moved all contacts with that relationship to 'other'. These changes are to prepare for our official Student Messaging experience coming in early 2024.
🎒 The ability for School Admins to use a .csv file with Student IDs for bulk student upload into custom groups directly in the TalkingPoints platform has been expanded to our partners who integrate through the .csv uploader.
🎒✏️ Instant Help Me Understand TalkingPoints is always striving to improve the quality and speed of translation. Our human translators are always ready to assist in a retranslation request, but it may take them some time to fill it. Knowing that speed matters, our help me understand feature now includes an instant retranslation that focuses on grammar mistakes and spelling to offer an alternate translation for your message.
🎒✏️ Do not translate: Sometimes translations can make it more difficult to understand where you need to go or who you need to talk to. By using curly braces, {text here}, you can choose to leave parts of your message in English. School or district names, homework assignment titles, and addresses are a few examples. Learn more about do not translate fields and other tips for writing for translation here.
🎒✏️ Default to the highest permission level: Any staff users that have access to multiple permission levels will default to their highest permission level.
🎒 Preview Messages and Announcements: Previewing the full message or announcement is now as easy as clicking on the message in the "Messages" tab. For direct messages, click "view full thread" to see the whole conversation. For announcements, view sent and read receipts, as well as reactions to announcements from family contacts using the TalkingPoints for Families app.
🎒 Urgent Template Category: To make it easier to inform your school or district about time-sensitive information, we have added an "Urgent" template category with a pre-translated default template for you to use.
✏️ Email Update Settings: Teachers can choose which TalkingPoints updates they would like to receive via email: Product Updates, Teacher Resources, and Research & News. Learn how here.
General interface cleanup to make your experience better every day. 🪄
🎒Staff Management Improvement: Access to proper permissions in the TalkingPoints platform is important for ease of use and ensuring that all staff members have the access they need to do their jobs. To make staff management easier, we have added the ability to bulk assign or remove roles to staff members.
💓 Families are opted into TalkingPoints by default to ensure that even the most hard-to-reach families get the important information they need from their teacher, school, or district. However, we understand that families may feel overwhelmed, or would like to choose which communications are the most helpful for them. Families using SMS text can choose to text "Goodbye" to leave a specific message thread, and "Stop" to opt out of all communications.
🎒✏️💓 New Help and Resource Center: TalkingPoints is moving to a new and improved help center experience. You can still access our chat support from the left-hand navigation panel--things just may look a tiny bit different! Resources will link you to our all-new resource hub where you will be able to access all TalkingPoints how-to articles. Any old links you may have saved will still be active, but we recommend transitioning to our new links and resource center moving forward.
🎒✏️💓Support for non-MT languages: To help reach families who speak languages where machine translation does not yet exist, our human translation team has pre-translated our in-app templates to convey common communications. Our newest addition is Chuukese.
🎒✏️💓 4 new languages: Lower Sorbian, Northern Sotho (Sepedi), Kirundi, and Setswana have all been added to the platform! This brings the total supported languages on TalkingPoints to 150 (and counting!)
🎒✏️ Well-Being Message Templates: Admins composing a message in the school product will now see a new category in their Templates drawer - “Well-Being”, which is meant to encompass all messages that lead to a student's comfort, health, and happiness. Admins can create templates and add them to this category for all staff in their community.
🎒 Message Archiving: The end of the school year is a great time to reset message history to start fresh for the new year. Find out how to set your school year start date and archive all messages from the year you are finishing. If a date is not selected, TalkingPoints will automatically archive messages on July 1st.
✏️ Viewing Archived Messages: If the school or district chooses to allow teachers to view archived messages from previous years, teachers and staff can toggle to a previous year's messages by following these steps.