This blog post shares how together Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Ednition enhanced TalkingPoints’ real-time, secure infrastructure—enabling districts to communicate quickly and effectively with families and guide best-practice engagement, while […]

“I spotlight in my book TalkingPoints, which helps teachers communicate with kids’ parents who don’t speak English. If you can get the parents more engaged, kids are a lot more successful in school. That’s a great example of a technology that fills a need.”

In celebration of its 10th anniversary, education technology nonprofit TalkingPoints has introduced a groundbreaking solution to address the national crisis of chronic absenteeism in U.S. schools. New Attendance Improvement tools harness the power of family engagement and data-driven outreach to help schools identify risk early, build trust, and improve student attendance.

The TalkingPoints Universal Family Engagement platform is featured in Family Engagement Solutions, a new resource from National PTA and the Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) at Johns Hopkins University highlighting evidence-based programs that strengthen family-school partnerships and improve student outcomes.

A recent study by education technology nonprofit TalkingPoints analyzed 40 million messages exchanged on a widely used school messaging platform. It found that 44% were passive messages about logistics, and 34% were standard replies of acknowledgement — the kinds of things modern parents are inundated with. On the other hand, only 8% of the messages were actionable items about academics, and only 5% were about homework.

Successes were seen for TalkingPoints, a family engagement platform that connects teachers and caregivers in more than 150 languages and improved student state-standardized math scores by nine points.

Successes were seen for TalkingPoints, an artificial intelligence platform that connects teachers and caregivers in more than 150 languages and improved student state-standardized math scores by nine points.

The reality is that investing in a tool like TalkingPoints is relatively low-cost and high-impact compared to many other school improvement programs.

Overdeck foundation founder shares how solutions like TalkingPoints improve academic outcomes in proven and affordable ways.

On International Women’s Day, TalkingPoints founder Heejae Lim is celebrated alongside several female entrepreneurs working to advance equity in this piece by Cisco.

Heejae Lim on how building school-family partnerships can help accelerate learning recovery and ease the burden on teachers. “Investing in family-school partnerships requires no new staff, but requires new mindsets. It taps into the basic math that a student spends much more time at home than in school, as well as the basic truth that a parent’s love for their child is universal.”

New Profit, the venture philanthropy organization, announced today an investment in TalkingPoints as one of five nonprofit organizations addressing economic and educational inequities in communities and school systems throughout the country. These investments are part of New Profit’s ongoing efforts to expand its portfolio of high-impact organizations led by visionary entrepreneurs who center the assets, expertise, and aspirations of the communities they serve.

In her TED talk, Heejae Lim, the only education leader selected as part of the class of 2022 TED Fellows Program, shares how 4 in 5 children in US schools who come from under-resourced and/or immigrant families and are more likely to fall behind – sometimes by as much as two school years. This equates to 40 million children, and represents a loss to the US economy of one trillion dollars each year. Her nonrprofit TalkingPoints helps close this achievement gap by unlocking the potential of families in driving student success.

TalkingPoints’ CEO Heejae Lim, the only education leader selected among the 20 changemakers in the 2022 TED Fellows program, shares the importance of increasing engagement for underserved and multilingual families, and how the TalkingPoints platform removes language and other barriers between schools and families so that students can thrive.

Today, TalkingPoints, an education technology nonprofit, shared the release of the TED Talk delivered by its founder and CEO, Heejae Lim. The 5-minute speech titled “The most powerful yet overlooked resource in schools,”, argues that the most powerful and underutilized resource in American public education is a family’s love for their children, and with the right tools, schools can remove barriers and facilitate meaningful connections that lead to improved outcomes for students. 

Back-to-school means back to checking emails, texts, apps and social-media pages for notes from teachers. For parents, managing school chatter can feel like another full-time job. What if schools agreed on one channel for communications? The Wall Street Journal finds that TalkingPoints was named as the best family communication platform for teachers and schools.

Heejae Lim, founder and CEO of TalkingPoints, and Peng Zhao, Citadel Securities CEO and founding board member of The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), share the importance of family engagement – especially when it comes to Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students and families – drawing on their experiences as immigrants to this country who understand the power of family engagement in education.

TalkingPoints, a nonprofit working to remove systemic barriers to family engagement for the benefit of student success and well-being, announced it had received a 2-year, $1 million grant from The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) to support its growth and reach among Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) families.

Nurses, counselors, bus drivers and other critical staff can connect directly with families through TalkingPoints platform, increasing family engagement.

Pickerington Schools more than doubled family engagement using TalkingPoints to send two-way translated text messages between parents and school employees including teachers, guidance counselors, school nurses, and even bus drivers.

Statistics show that 65% of the districts’ families use the platform, and 73% of them rate TalkingPoints as “highly effective.” As Michael Chiodo, principal at Lincoln Annex school notes, “To use the words of some of my teachers, it was a game-changer.”

The $10 million gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott will allow TalkingPoints to accelerate its ambitious plans to improve the academic success and well-being of tens of millions of under-resourced students by rapidly scaling its approach.

TalkingPoints receives transformational $10 million gift from MacKenzie Scott to expand its impact in advancing meaningful, equitable family engagement.

TalkingPoints’ Heejae Lim profiled as one of the 32 impactful nonprofit leaders of organizations that will undoubtedly impact the world in 2022.

Pickerington Local School District in Ohio is using the TalkingPoints translation app to better communicate with the families of students who are learning English. Elizabeth Curtis, English-language coordinator for the district, says the app has been well-received by teachers and families.

TalkingPoints’ CEO selected as the sole education leader in the 2022 cohort of TED Fellows, joining a class of 20 change-makers from around the world to deliver a talk on the TED stage this April in Vancouver.

Heejae Lim is the sole education leader selected to present at TED2022

After dozens of hours of testing, Common Sense Media chooses TalkingPoints as the standout messaging tool for families, teachers, and students.

Fairfax schools adopted TalkingPoints to bridge language gaps and help underprivileged families overcome technological and communication barriers, allowing parents to send and receive translated texts in many languages, including Spanish, Korean, and French.

“The app was really nice because they would just send them a text message to their phone and they could easily just respond right there and then,” Cabrera said. “And I feel like that also made it less formal. It was more casual, and they could just text me, whenever [the parents] had a question, which a lot of my parents did, like they would just quickly send me a text and I would get it. So, I think it just made the communication easier.”

Mahnaz Charania, PhD, details five emerging opportunities for leaders to explore to activate the latent social capital within families to improve students’ experiences and outcomes. Whether they succeed depends on where and how schools activate family networks, and for what purposes.

Mahnaz R. Charania, Ph.D., looks at how effectively and equitably serving every student will require new models that help schools unlock the potential of families as sources of support for students’ well-being and learning. By weaving families’ aspirations and assets into students’ learning — inside and outside the classroom — schools can make the long overdue shift from one-way communication to two-way, authentic family engagement.

TalkingPoints’ founder Heejae Lim is featured in this annual celebration of tech nonprofit leaders who are transforming the social impact tech space by pursuing big visions for improving lives through technology.

Northfield Public Schools is helping remove obstacles to family engagement through TalkingPoints. “It’s an incredible equalizer,” said Carrie Duba, one of the district’s PreK-12 systems and instructional coaches.

The past year and a half have transformed home-school connections; we need to build on this foundation.

How Buffalo Public Schools is using TalkingPoints as part of its strategy to meet the needs of its diverse community, including an influx of Afghan refugee students.

Fast Forward’s Shannon Farley engages TalkingPoints CEO Heejae Lim and Google Fellow Fiona Yeung in conversaton about how TalkingPoints and Google Org teamed up to support students from under-resourced, multilingual communities.

Despite the many challenges of remote learning, digitally-accessible high-quality instructional materials that supported families to be active partners increased student learning and engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Talking Points CEO Heejae Lim explains how her organization is bridging communication gaps between families and teachers.

How can schools redesign parent and family engagement so that students continue to be engaged and successful in their learning both during and post-COVID?

Tools to build great learning experiences for remote students. Explore this Best Tools for Virtual and Distance Learning Top Picks list of 18 tools curated by Common Sense Education editors to find relevant and engaging edtech solutions for your classroom.

With TalkingPoints, Heejae Lim, MBA ’15, bridges language barriers between teachers and parents.

Correction appended Oct. 19 As of the first weeks of the school year, parents and teachers at 35,000 schools nationwide have been communicating via text messages translated into 108 languages. The platform they use, created by the education technology nonprofit TalkingPoints, has seen a fifteen-fold…

Many teachers say they are struggling to connect with English-language learners at home, but are using high- and low-tech methods in an attempt to overcome the digital divide and other challenges.

Jay Subedi has been a contributing Syracuse community member for about 12 years. Now, Subedi runs his own home health care business and serves on various Syracuse boards and committees. English is Subedi’s second language after Nepali. It’s also the second language for his wife and two children. Fiv…

In light of school closures caused by COVID-19, millions of students are home for the remainder of the academic year. Philanthropy will play a vital role in the response to this crisis. But how can education funders and donors ensure that they are allocating their resources effectively?

Seven years ago, Google’s artificial intelligence technology was barely able to identify cat videos with passable precision. So what can its AI do today when it comes to tackling actual problems—say, famine, flooding, pollution and parent engagement?

Randomized evaluation of the TalkingPoints multilingual family engagement platform will assess the intervention’s impact on student achievement.

Communication, conversation, and relationships are the underpinnings of strong family-school partnerships. Yet, with over 350 languages spoken in U.S. homes today

Enabling a young mother to access essential nutrition benefits over text. Activating a high schooler’s passion for voting rights through digital engagement campaigns. Every day, nonprofit organizations create innovative communication solutions to reach people where they are and deliver services central to their programs. Twilio.org partners with social impact organizations around the world to build and scale these life changing communications.

Heejae Lim, founder of TalkingPoints, an app that translates text messages from educators into a parent’s home language, likes to tell a story of a San Francisco middle school principal. The administrator wanted to connect with the parents of a Spanish-speaking student at risk of failing. He tried visiting the family at home twice, to no avail.

TalkingPoints is an education technology nonprofit working to make it easy for any parent to be engaged in their children’s education—especially in low-income, diverse communities. Through a parent education platform with human- and AI-powered translation, we help teachers and parents communicate, build relationships, and understand what effective parent engagement looks like.

Language and cultural barriers are familiar ground to me. As a Korean who grew up in England and then moved to the US, I’ve encountered plenty of challenges in cultural and language translation. But today I’m becoming less and less of an anomaly. Minorities will make up more than 50% of the United States population by 2020.

TalkingPoints is a nonprofit, and our mission is to unlock the potential of low-income, immigrant families in the U.S. to be able to support their children’s learning.

Utah-based Pluralsight’s Create the Future Awards recognize companies changing the world for the better. We met two of them: one teaches tech skills to human-trafficking victims, while another helps bridge language barriers between parents and teachers.

One in four children in the United States is born to an immigrant family, according to the Casey Foundation, and there will be 40 million children born to immigrant or underserved families by 2030. These children are becoming one of the fastest growing student demographics, with states in the South and Southeast seeing the number of English Language Learner students double year after year. Yet school systems, educators, and communities are not adequately prepared or resourced for this pace of change.

WestEd study of TalkingPoints impact showed that 87 percent of parents increased engagement—by doing things like responding to messages, initiating conversations with teachers, and showing up to school events—after receiving more communication from their children’s teachers through TalkingPoints. This was especially the case for low-income parents of color, with 100 percent of parents increasing their involvement.

We’ve all heard the theory that the most successful businesses have one thing in common: They identify a problem that people have and they solve it. If only it were that simple.

Kids growing up in low-income neighborhoods have always faced extra challenges when it comes to keeping up with their middle- to high-income peers. And with the dawning of the digital age, low-income students now face a new, unprecedented challenge: access to high-speed internet.

Predictions for the potential of artificial intelligence wax poetic — solutions from climate change to curing disease — but the everyday applications make it seem far more mundane, like a glorified clock radio.

The following piece is based on a conversation we recently had with Heejae Lim, Founder and Executive Director of TalkingPoints. As a Korean immigrant student, Heejae saw first-hand the difference between her friends with English-speaking parents who were deeply engaged in their education versus non-English speaking parents who struggled to be involved.

As a parent, I can’t even begin to describe how important I think home to school/school to home communication is for my sanity and my child’s success. My son is a bit of a mad scientist, which is all well and good, but have you seen the inside of a mad scientist’s backpack?

Strong parent-teacher partnerships are key to student success in the classroom. In fact, parental engagement is very effective at predicting student achievement. When teachers and parents are in regular contact about students’ needs, progress, and successes, students feel supported and motivated to try their best in school.

STEM is high on the mind of the folks over at AT&T Aspire Accelerator. Three of the six teams selected to participate in its second six-month accelerator program aim to help students code and explore science careers.

As the largest competition of its kind, the EBPC features multiple cash prizes totaling $140,000, and awards prizes in two categories – one aimed at Idea-stage companies that are just getting started and Ventures, which already have revenues, grants, customers, or investments.

More than 1 million users. Sixteen billion monthly page views. Ninety-nine percent user engagement. If these sound like stats from tech companies, you’re right. Except these tech companies are nonprofits.

San Francisco-based nonprofit TalkingPoints announced yesterday the launch of a centralized school-wide platform designed to help school officials communicate with all of the families they serve, regardless of language barriers.

Parental engagement is twice as likely to influence a student’s long-term success as socioeconomic status, some studies say, but when parents struggle to engage because of language limitations, it creates a big barrier between home and school.

Last week, The NewSchools Venture Fund announced the winners of a funding competition designed to find the best edtech tools that are helping English Language Learners (ELLs) learn.

Amanda Roman, an English as a second language teacher in Elmsford, used to have to translate handwritten Spanish notes from students’ parents for her colleagues.

Google wants Bay Area residents to pick the groups with the best ideas for transforming local lives. Google.org, the search giant’s philanthropic arm, is seeking public input on its Google Impact Challenge grants to “change-makers and forward-thinkers who challenge the status quo … with big ideas for an even better Bay Area,” as it says on its website.

First, it was parent-teacher communication by texting. Now, ClassDojo and Remind seem to be in a race to share information with parents in whatever native language they speak.

At a demo day in San Francisco on Wednesday, Joyce Kim’s presentation of her financial tech startup sounded a lot like a tech startup pitching venture capitalists for funding. She scrolled through a slide deck and stood at a podium, sporting a t-shirt of her startup.

Language barriers don’t exist in a vacuum. Let’s say a parent can’t communicate in English with their kid’s teacher, and that teacher only speaks English. The problem at hand isn’t just a translation issue. It’s a language barrier that limits the parent’s ability to participate in their child’s education, and limits the child’s development.