GroupTing Makes It Easy to Coordinate Classroom Events and Volunteers

We're starting to get into the time of the school year in which a lot of elementary schools will be having special events like classroom parties and PTA fundraisers. As anyone who has tried to organize those kind of events can tell you, it can become a time-consuming task to get everything coordinated. GroupTing is a free service that makes it easy to coordinated events and volunteers. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to organize an event in GroupTing.


This video is number 165 in my playlist of Practical Ed Tech Tips.

Three Tools for Coordinating Contributions to School Events

In my previous post I suggested some tools for choosing meeting and event times. Once you've chosen a date for a school/ classroom event, you might need to organize volunteers who are helping with the event. This could mean organizing volunteer roles or organizing contributions so that you don't end up with 100 paper cups and no paper plates at your classroom party. The following three tools will help you coordinate contributions to your school or classroom event.

GroupTing is a service that makes it easy to organize group events. The purpose of GroupTing is to enable you and your event attendees to keep track of who is attending your event and what they are bringing to it. For example, if I'm planning a classroom party and I need parents to contribute cups, beverages, snacks, plates and napkins, when I send out my invitations I can request that people bring one or more of those items. GroupTing allows me to specify how many of each item is needed and who has volunteered to bring the requested items.

Choice Eliminator is a Google Forms Add-on that removes response choices from your form as they are used up. This can be handy when you are having people complete a Google Form in order to select meeting times with you or you're having them complete a form to indicate what they are sending into school for a class party. To use Choice Eliminator start by creating your Google Form as you normally would. Then enable Choice Eliminator on your Form. Once Choice Eliminator is enabled you can select the question or questions that you want to have choices removed from as they are used.

Volunteer Spot is a free scheduling service that teachers, coaches, and others and use to coordinate volunteers. Volunteer Spot gives you the ability to post calendars and sign-up sheets online. When potential volunteers visitor your calendar they can see the days and times at which volunteers are needed. You can also use Volunteer Spot to coordinate sign-ups for contributions to an event. For example, you can use Volunteer Spot to have people sign-up to bring specific items from a list of needed items. When the quota for volunteers for a particular time, day, or item is reached, Volunteer Spot won't allow any more sign-ups.

Socializing School Events With Social Media

Last week I received a copy of Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick's book The Art of Social Media. It's a quick read that is full of actionable items. One of the chapters of the book is about incorporating social media into physical events like conferences. As I read the chapter I thought, "this could apply to school events."

Here's the general outline of how this could work:
1. Let's say your school's music program is having a fundraiser event like an auction or a costume contest.

2. Pick a hashtag for the event and let people know about it. Print it out and plaster it on posters with prompts like, "remember to tag your pictures, #myschoolrocks."

3.  Use a tool like TweetDeck or Hootsuite to monitor the hashtag and reTweet, Pin, reGram, tag, and otherwise help the event's hashtag grow.

4. After the event is over go through and choose a bunch of pictures and or Tweets to create a collage of highlights of the events. Tools like Pic-Collage and PicMonkey make it easy to build collages. (Remember to ask for permission to re-use another person's pictures). Post the collages on your school's Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. Of course, you'll also want to use the collages in your school newsletter too.

Why do this?
1. Your students and their parents are already likely to be using social media during after-school events.

2. By encouraging the use of and tracking a hashtag you can have a better sense of what is being said about the event.

3. People love to see pictures of themselves (the selfie stick is the new symbol of narcissism) so by including their pictures in news about the event they're more likely to share news about the event.

4. If the event went well, people had fun, and money was raised (or whatever the event's goal was), you now have a small army of people who have positive feelings about the school that they are sharing throughout their communities. Sharing good feelings and comments about your school is always a good thing.

Try Tackk for Promoting and Organizing Event Registrations

Tackk is a nice service for creating simple webpages, announcement pages, and digital portfolios. I've featured Tackk a couple of times in the past. The latest update to Tackk introduced an RSVP option.

When you create an announcement or event page on Tackk you have the option to use an RSVP widget. The RSVP option allows visitors to specify how many people they are bringing to your event and to enter comments like, "I'll bring cookies to the bake sale."

Applications for Education
Creating a Tackk event page with the RSVP widget could be a good way to quickly advertise a school event and get a sense of how many people will attend. As I hinted at above, Tackk event pages could be good for advertising and organizing an event like a PTA bake sale.

Splash - Create Event Pages and Collect RSVPs

Splash is a free service that you can use to create great-looking event announcements and collect RSVPs.

Using Splash you can create a one page announcement of your event. To your Splash page you can add all of the important information that attendees need to know about your event. You can customize your page with your images or use the Splash stock images for your page. Attendees can RSVP through your Splash page. If you choose, you can create an auto-responder and send information directly to an attendees's email address after they RSVP. Take a look at  the Splash page I made for an event at my house in March.

Applications for Education
Splash could be a good way to advertise an event at your school. The RSVP option makes it easy to keep track of how many attendees to expect at your next school event.

H/T to Make Use Of.