Got curious about this Remind101 about and went to the site. Seems that parents can subscribe to the same messages as their kids and no phone numbers are actually exchanged in process. I think teachers can also schedule a reminder for a future date; so, they can integrate reminders with their curriculum and parents/students can subscribe as they see fit.
re: JonLaw and Apple... me too, Mac was such a crushing disillusionment from the AppleII (the hacker device where you could open it and swap chips and rewrite the ROM, etc.) The first Mac was a bundled, packaged, protected mini-empire that was the antithesis of the spirit that made Apple a success in the first place.
As a college prof, the issue with tech is meeting them where the students are - we are online and have apps because that's where the world is, in someways it's better, allows us to do stuff we couldn't, like real time participation during the presidential debate as opposed to the next time I saw them.
Interestingly about ABQmom's note about cell phones, studies of poor communities around the world have found that more and more are bridging the digital divide by smart phones as they are much much cheaper than computers. It would not be surprising for poorer families to have Internet access via cell rather than computer. However, I agree there has to be a means for non tech users to have access.
But it also seems like this really gets to what a lot of MS parents here seem to complain about - their dc's having the assignment and taking responsibility. This did seem like a way to do what we are doing, reach the kids where they are.
Disillusioned Mac users - jobs biography has a fascinating discussion of the fallout between Wozniak and jobs over closed versus open tech. Wozniak has a wonderfully
Zen disucssion of jobs and concedes that tech people hate jobs closed approach but that jobs was really about the non tech masses, people who just want it to work, new maps app notwithstanding
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