Seeking educators' feed back for parent focused Google Classroom App

[Jun Ying]

Hello everyone,

My name is Jun Ying. I'm the co-founder of Better Parent, an app that helps parents keep track of their children's Google Classroom activities. We give parents the ability to easily view and filter assignments by class, state (due soon, late, graded, etc), read announcements, etc, and get course info, for multiple children. All this is done without requiring teachers to do anything extra. Our website is https://www.betterparent.net.

The app grew out of our own needs to engage more in our children's education, especially in the pandemic world. We have children from 4th grade to seniors, in public and private schools. We found Google Classroom is great for the kids, but severely limiting for parents. Being developers ourselves, we set out to create something useful for ourselves. Just yesterday, my co-founders' daughter had this exchange with him:

Volunteered iMessage from daughter:

"The OPEC notes assignment won't be turned in because I have nothing to fill them out with. She didn't assign the powerpoint she said she would."

My co-founder, the dad:

"Ha. Bc I will notice in my app?"

Daughter:

"Yeah."

We have many other similar comments from parents. We recently went live in the app stores, after great feedback from parents during the beta period. While our target users will continue to be parents for the foreseeable future, we would like to deliver values for teachers and school administrators as well. The seemingly obvious one is to allow parent/teacher communication. One of our goals is actually to REDUCE low value/unnecessary emails from parents to teachers, such as asking what assignment is coming up and if anything is late. We would love to get your thoughts on what you would like to see in a parent focused app as teachers. Feel free to comment on this thread, or contact me directly. Happy to do a demo for you as well.

Thank you for all that you do.

Jun