PingSchool: School Messages

Absence notes. Pickup-line reminders. Chess club on Thursdays. If you are a parent, you send the same handful of messages to school over and over — and usually at 7:58 in the morning, one-handed, in a car park. PingSchool turns those messages into buttons. Write it once. Tap it whenever you need it. WHAT IT DOES • One-tap actions. Buttons like ABSENT, PICKUP, DROPOFF and CLUB open an email that is already filled in — recipients, subject and body. Read it, change anything you like, then send. You name the buttons and pick their colours. • Text as well as email. If the office has a mobile number, PingSchool also writes a short text and opens it in your messaging app, ready to send from your own number. • Call in one tap. The Call button lists everyone in Settings with a phone number — the office, the bus, the other parent. • Routines that send themselves. Every Monday and Tuesday at 11:00, tell the office you will be in the pickup line. An optional reminder arrives shortly before, with Skip this time, Send now, or Edit. • Alarms that ring on your phone. Leave for the pickup line. Get up in time for the bus. These are reminders for you and send no email to anyone. • More than one child. Add each child with their own pronouns, then select two at once so a single email covers both of them properly. • Placeholders. Type {{child}}, {{today}} or {{reason}} into any message and PingSchool fills them in as it composes. Around twenty of them cover dates, times, pronouns, pickup and drop-off arrangements, and late arrivals. • Attachments. A doctor's note, a clinic PDF, or a photo of a form taken on the spot. Up to five files per message. • A record of what you sent. History lists every message, filtered by action and by child, so you can check whether anyone has already told the school. • Notes and the school calendar. Locker codes, bus numbers, who to ask about the field trip. Load the district calendar as a PDF and term dates are one tap away. • Share with the other parent. Join a household and your notes and your record of what the school has been told are the same on both phones. Email accounts and schedules stay private to each parent, so the office never receives two copies of the same message. • Parents chat. Message the other parent inside PingSchool, and react with an emoji. IT SENDS FROM YOUR OWN EMAIL ADDRESS AND NUMBER This is the part that matters. PingSchool connects to your own mail account — Gmail with an app password, Brevo, or any SMTP provider — and sends directly from your device. The school receives an ordinary email from you, with your name on it. Not a "noreply". Not a message from an app they have never heard of, which a busy office may not act on. It lands in the same thread as every other email you have sent them, and they can simply reply. The same login also reads your Inbox and Sent Mail, so you can check for a reply without leaving the app. YOUR MAIL STAYS YOURS • Your email password or API key is stored on your device and is never sent to us. • Your emails and texts are not relayed through, stored on, or read by any PingSchool server. Only what you share with a household — notes, send history and chat — is stored, and only its members can read it. • There is no sign-up wall. Signing in is optional and almost everything works without it. • No adverts. No tracking. No analytics. Full details are in the privacy policy at pingschool.com/privacy. SETTING UP 1. Connect your email. For Gmail, turn on 2-Step Verification, create an App Password, and paste it in. Outlook, iCloud, Brevo and plain SMTP work too. 2. Add your children and the staff you write to. 3. Build your buttons, or use the four that come ready. About five minutes, and then you mostly stop thinking about it. Want to look around first? Settings → Load sample data fills the app with a made-up family so you can see how everything fits together, and removes it again in one tap.