✏️ To make TalkingPoints faster and more efficient, we’ve made updates to how classes display when composing announcements:

If you’re under these limits, you’ll see all your classes and students without needing to search. This change will help speed things up, making TalkingPoints even easier to use!
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✏️ 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.

✏️ Family Engagement Insights: For teachers, especially those managing multiple classes, determining which families are not engaging - either because they have not received a direct message or they have not responded to messages - can be arduous and time-consuming. This difficulty makes it challenging to effectively recognize and address the obstacles preventing family engagement. To remove this barrier and make it easier for teachers to ensure they are reaching and engaging with all families, we are introducing new family engagement insights and tracking for teachers

✏️💓 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. To help families find the phone number to rejoin a conversation or opt back into TalkingPoints, follow the steps in this help article

✏️ 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.

General interface cleanup to make your experience better every day. 🪄

General interface cleanup to make your experience better every day. 🪄

✏️💓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.

General interface cleanup to make your experience better every day. 🪄

✏️ 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.
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✏️ 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. 🪄

💓 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 using our new 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!)

✏️ Viewing Archived Messages: If your 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.