Messages in Parent Square can be used to send direct messages to students, families or students if they are in high school and have students square. To send a message in Parent Square, you wanna log into your parent square account, and then on the left hand side over here of the navigation menu, you'll select messages and then new message.

 Once and once you are under new messages, you will see your student directory populate. These are gonna populate from your classes in Aspen. You will see students names here. When you select a student name, you can select more than one name at a time or just one name. Their name of their, the names of their parents or legal guardians will populate here under recipients. Generally you'll see two recipients populate for each student. Sometimes only one. You can x out a a parent name here if you were only messaging one parent, or you can leave both there if you needed to message both parents. 

Now, when I send this message, I can select to send it as a private message. What that will do is send it to each person as a separate message. They won't be able to see each other's replies. They won't be able to communicate with each other. If I sent it as a group message, this is helpful. If you needed all people in the party to be able to reply to each other and see each other's comments, I would select group message. You can also tag in here an administrator or a guidance counselor if this or another co-teacher, if this was a conversation that you wanted other people to be involved in as well, just to select group message so that your administrator would be able to see the replies and be able to reply themselves  to both parents. I would type my message in here. 

I could add an image if I needed to, if I had student media releases on file for that particular child. I can even add an attachment if maybe there was a PDF that I needed to attach to this message. Now I would never select all of my students and send a message because that would create one message where I would have many, many parents involved. If there was something that you were sending to everyone in your class, that would be a post that public information that everybody can see So messages are more, think about like a texting conversation that you would have with just one student's family or a couple of student's families. If, for example, maybe they were helping with a classroom party or like a field day event and you needed multiple parents to work together on something. So lots of different uses from messages. This does work really well in the app version of Parent Square as well.