Hey folks, a friend of mine is working on a research project trying to connect students to their teachers, parents, and other community members via texting. Here is his description of the use cases. BTW, his name is Uche Amaechi, and he lives in Somerville, MA.
The usecases I see are:
1. Teacher sends message to all kids reminding them of homework, field trips, events etc.
- 1.1 Kids can respond directly to teacher
- 1.2 Kids can respond to the group
2. Teacher sends message to individual kid about whatever
- Kid can respond directly to teacher
3. Teacher sends messages to set group of kids (or kids and adults)
- 3.1 Kid can respond to teacher
- 3.2 Kid can respond to group
- 3.3 Kid can respond to individual kids in the receiving group
General question: What's the easiest and fastest way to do this given:
- That most of these kids might not have smart phones, although the teacher presumably does
- Many of these kids will not have computers @ home
- We want to give teachers (and students) the ability to disconnect from the group
- We want the receiving parties to be able to see who else is receiving the particular message
- We'd like to be able to track the conversations. So we can track the conversations that come through the teacher, but what about point to point communications.
The only group SMS service I've heard about is tatango, but that seems to be focused on one-to-many broadcast, not many-to-many or one-to-one, at least. Any others come close to covering all the needs above?