As a community, the Gibson Southern School Corporation decided to switch to ClassTag as its unified communication system. ClassTag is used for parents to be included in the day-to-day reminders that students have throughout the corporation. However, conversation has been stirred up regarding whether or not students, their parents and staff actually use it or not. There is also discussion if it is even effective for students to view or even use.
Gibson Southern’s Technology Integration Specialist, Jenna Gengelbach, presented the app ClassTag to the corporation as a streamline communication throughout the community.
“After researching and meeting with several different companies, ClassTag had the necessary features (emergency alerts, announcements, direct messaging, etc.) without being overly complicated to users,” Gengelbach said.
Teachers are the primary users of ClassTag but it is not as popular as one may think.
“In all honesty, I do most of my communication in email or Google Classroom,” English teacher Elizabeth Elpers said.
When Gibson Southern administration was sold on the idea of using ClassTag, the staff had a crash course on it before the start of the school year. This was to get the staff comfortable with using this new source of communication.
Vice Principal Amanda Sefton wanted this to be a swift transition but realized there were going to be some hiccups in the system. When they realized that students were not getting any of the ClassTag notifications, it confused some of them.
“It was harder to make student groups than what was originally realized,” Sefton said.
Despite the frustrations, there are quite a few advantages to ClassTag. It is an auto enrollment, so users do not have to create an account for it. To join a reminder or group, users have to manually sign up by giving a phone number or email to receive notifications or messages.
If a student or a parent receives emails or is connected to Gibson Southern by any network, those users automatically receive a notification from ClassTag and messages.
“ClassTag syncs with our Skyward system; therefore, we have that parent-guardian information in our system to where it’s synced,” Sefton said.
Like anything new, ClassTag has its imperfections. Only a couple of years ago, the corporation switched from Schoology to Google Classroom. Even that change caused an uproar, because when one is familiar with something for so long, it is hard to accept change.
Hopefully in time ClassTag will become more accessible for the student body and will become the new norm for all when it comes to communicating between the school and the school community.
“If we get that functionality to where student groups can be in there, I think that would be huge,” Sefton said. “Until then, at the high school, it’s going to be very tricky.”
