TalkingPoints Comunity

The beginning of a new school year can be quite a busy time for you. You’re setting up a new classroom, planning your lessons, and most importantly, building connections with new students and families. Our main goal here at TalkingPoints is to support you in making those connections seamless. We have rounded up some of […]

The beginning of the school year brings lots of new and exciting things for teachers, families, and students! One of those is always Back to School Night, where teachers get to meet the families of their new students. Here, we’ll give a few tips on how to engage your families before, during, and after Back to […]

Heejae Lim, founder and CEO of TalkingPoints with Ms. Velasquez, an elementary school teacher from Oakland TalkingPoints announced today a grant investment round by Google.org of $1.5 million to offer personalized, real-time coaching content to parents and teachers while continuously improving the translation quality on the TalkingPoints family engagement platform

In April 2019, Houston was named as the most diverse city in the U.S. by WalletHub. As I start each school year in Katy, Texas, a suburb in west Houston, I can attest that this is true. In the 2017-2018 school year, I had students from Turkey

I am an English Language Development teacher in St. Charles, MO. For the last three years, I have been able to work with every fifth grade English Language Learner in our district. In my first year teaching, to be honest, I only communicated with families when there was a big behavior problem with a student and for Parent Teacher Conferences. There was this void in communication and partnership that was not healthy to student learning. The families didn’t fully know what their kids were learning or how they were growing. I felt helpless to communicate effectively with my students’ families because I wasn’t fluent in their home languages.

Ms. Carter is a second grade teacher in Los Angeles, CA. Two years ago, her school adopted TalkingPoints and she’s seen a complete change in her parents’ involvement. Before TalkingPoints, Ms. Carter found it difficult to reach parents and get their buy-in, due to language barriers. Parent participation was around 50%. TalkingPoints has allowed her to […]

Mr. Khabushani is a middle school history teacher in Los Angeles, CA. He learned about TalkingPoints from his school principal and used it communicate with families in their home languages. His goal was to send more individual messages through TalkingPoints, since the previous school year, he had sent more general announcements home. This is what […]

Strong parent-teacher partnerships are key to supporting students’ success in the classroom. When teachers and parents are in regular communication about students’ needs, progress and successes, students feel supported, motivated to try their best and do significantly better in school. A study by Westat and Policy Studies Associates for the U.S. Department of Education has […]

Last year, Ms. Eganhouse was an elementary school teacher and building technology specialist in Des Moines, Iowa. She had heard about TalkingPoints from her graduate school course on building strong school communities and decided to try it out, because around 40% of her students’ families don’t speak English at home. In this blog post, Ms. […]

Ms. Rufenacht is an ESOL teacher in Fayette County, Georgia. She had learned about TalkingPoints from her district’s ESOL department last fall and has actively used it to communicate and build partnerships with her students’ parents, regardless of the languages they speak. Ms. Rufenacht shares about the positive impact TalkingPoints has had on her, her students […]