Use Parent Connection in your class teams to easily see the names of your students' parents and guardians and reach out to them via Teams chat. They will receive invitations to join your Teams chat in the email they've given to the school.
Learn more about Parent Connection and how its features can benefit you and the students in your class!
Note: Your school's IT Admin manages settings for Parent Connection.
Parent Connection in your class team
Find Parent Connection within an individual class team along with the other apps enabled for your class (Assignments, Grades, Class Notebook, and Insights). In Parent Connection, you'll be able to find a roster of parents and guardians associated with each student (roster data is provided by School Data Sync).
Click to call, email, or schedule a meeting
Communicate with parents/guardians through Parent Connection in your class team.
Select a parent/guardian to view their direct contact information, including their personal email address and phone number. Select their phone number to initiate a call or their email address to launch your default mail client and draft a new outgoing message.
You can also create a Teams meeting from the parent/guardian roster to connect with your students' families. Parents/guardians can also join the Teams meeting as guests.
All these features can be accessed by the Teams app on desktop, web, or mobile.
Reach out with Teams chat
Use Teams on desktop or mobile to initiate a Teams chat from the parent/guardian roster and connect with your students' families. Just like your other Teams chats, this chat appears in your chat pane and is searchable from the Teams search bar. New users who join the chat will see the chat history with all previously sent messages.
Upon sending the first message in a new chat, any parent/guardian who hasn't yet joined Teams will be sent an invitation along with your message. If you compose another message in the chat from the Parents app, you will also see a banner on the compose box indicating parents and guardians who haven't joined and will receive another invitation.
A message can include only plain text (no formatting, etc.) and is limited to 10,000 characters. You can send up to 4,500 invites per day. Parents/guardians can receive up to 20 invites per chat per day.
Send Bulk Announcements
Teachers can now use Teams Parent App to send announcements to all the class parents.
To send an announcement, navigate to the Announcement tab inside the Parent App, compose your message, and select the send button. This will create a broadcast message for all the parents of the students in the class.
Update Parent Contact Information
In case you do not see parent details (which might happen if your school does not use SDS), you can directly add parent contact details corresponding to each student. A maximum of five guardians can be added per student.
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To add or update parent contact details, click on the edit icon.
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You can update an existing parent’s details by selecting the parent and modifying their contact details.
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You can add a new parent by selecting Add new parent.
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Fill in the parent name and email (compulsory fields).
Note: Additionally, you can also add the parent’s contact number. Please note: This number should be in the E.164 format. For example, format phone numbers as +[country code][area code][phone number], like +12223334444.
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Select Save.
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Once all the parent details are updated, select Send for approval. This will generate an Approval request, which is sent to your school's global or teams admin for review. The parent contact details cannot be modified if there is an already active approval request.
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Once the admin approves the request, you can start communicating with parents on the newly updated contact details.
To track the status of the approval request, you can follow these steps. Navigate to the approvals app inside Teams -> Select sent tab -> Select Filter and search by title Approval request to update Parent/Guardian details. This allows a view of all sent requests for parent information update.
What parents/guardians see
When you send a message to a parent/guardian who hasn’t joined Teams, they'll receive an invitation via email with your message and a prompt to join the Teams chat.
To help parents and guardians get started, share this resource on how to connect with educators in Teams.
Note: Messages sent to guardians will include just the plain text of the message, without HTML and other formatting content.
