What Are Parent Accounts?

Gaggle's parent accounts are full email accounts that can email anyone in the Internet world, except the students of other parents in the school or district. Parent accounts have access to the Directory and Address Book, which allows them to easily communicate with their child's teacher(s). Parent accounts do not have access to the Message Boards, Chat Rooms, or other students' Digital Lockers, Blogs, and Profile Pages.

The purpose of Gaggle's parent accounts is two fold: (1) they make it easy for educators to communicate with the parents of various subsets of students and (2) they allow parents to monitor their children's Gaggle activities.

Enhanced Home-to-School Communication

Parent accounts make it easy to enhance home-to-school communication and provide an easy way for schools to communicate with parents using the power of email. All parent users can be easily located via the Directory and User List pages and it is very simple to email the parents of various sets of Gaggle users. Because the parent accounts can be set to forward to an outside email address, the parents do not need to log into Gaggle to receive email updates.

Sending to the parents of a subset of students is very easy. You first choose the relevant students and then choose to send to "The Parents of those students". For example, a teacher could choose "My Class" from the lookup menu and then choose to send email to "the Parents of My Class". This intuitive system saves teacher time because it is so simple.

Parental Monitoring

Parent accounts can be linked to their children's Gaggle accounts in the school or district. When parents log into Gaggle they are able to view a list of their children. Parents can drill into their children's accounts and view all emails, blog entries, profile pages and more. Parents can be linked to all of their children under one account even if they have children in several different schools throughout the district.

Giving parents to ability to monitor their children's Gaggle activities, can remove some of the monitoring responsibility from the teacher. The teachers still receive all of the blocked messages for the students, but the parent can help ensure that their children are using the Gaggle accounts appropriately.

How to Sign Up for Parent Accounts

The parent accounts feature is only available to our subscription users. If you are currently a free Gaggle user, we would be happy to speak with you about subscription options. The parent accounts are available at the same low price as your students' Gaggle accounts. Please note that Parent Accounts are not e-rate eligible.

In order to set up parent accounts, the school must first have Gaggle enable the option in your school group. Then the accounts can then be created from the Add Users page the same way teacher and student accounts are created.

If you are interested in learning more about parent accounts or getting parent accounts set up for your school, please feel free to contact us at 800-288-7750 or at support@gaggle.net.

Cost for Parent Accounts

The Parent accounts are available at the same cost as your regular Gaggle accounts. For customers with district wide student subscriptions to Gaggle, discounts are available. Parent accounts are not eligible for e-rate.