Share On Remind

At Remind, a core component of our product development process involves obsessing about data and investigating user behavior—especially the patterns that emerge within the unique ecosystems of the classroom and the school. As we explored ways that educators engage with their classes on Remind, we discovered that active teachers tend to send messages that contain files, links, photos, videos, suggestions, and more.

This was a pattern that seemed promising, and we decided to look into making it even easier for teachers to share the content, tools, and services they use regularly with their classes. After working with our research team to gather more insight about this behavior, we launched the Share on Remind button to streamline how our users access their classes where they communicate—on Remind.

Although development was fairly simple, we’ve worked hard to be intentional in our design decisions so that the Remind experience remains simple and easy to use for teachers and developers alike.

Consistency is key.

Composing a message remains exactly the same in both the Remind mobile app and online in a web browser. Teachers don’t need to learn a new feature—it works exactly the way they’ve come to expect.

No developer account or SDK required. (With clear docs!)

We strive to create simplicity for teachers, and we wanted to apply that same approach to the partners who choose to distribute their content and services through Remind. We designed the share button to work without a developer account or SDK, so all an engineer has to do is paste the sample code from our API docs into their site, test, and launch.

Mobile-friendly integrations.

Most of Remind’s teachers use the app on their phones. To ensure a seamless experience on mobile or web, our mobile integrations use deeplinks so that clicking on the Share on Remind button opens Remind if the app is available. If it isn’t, the user falls back to a mobile web experience.

Streamlined share components.

Remind users share a wide variety of educational content, tools, and services with their classes. To support this breadth, we designed a very simple component that includes text and a URL—another mobile-friendly protocol. Any customization beyond those parameters would have made it challenging for some of our partners to match a scheme that doesn’t make sense for their product, or hard for our teachers to make sense of the sharing scheme from tool to tool.

Simplicity wins partnerships.

Because the feature was so lightweight, we were able to build and launch Share on Remind with 13 partners across the education space on a fairly accelerated timeline. In fact, most of our partners only required API docs with information they could copy and paste for launch.

But this simple investment means that Remind users can now directly share interactive lessons from NearPod, study sets from Quizlet, engaging videos from PBS, and more from Brilliant, Duolingo, Educents, Educreations, Flipgrid, Front Row, Kaizena, Newsela, Quizizz, and Signup. For teachers used to copying and pasting links into Remind, a feature like this means streamlining a multi-step process and putting time back on their clocks.

Implementing Share on Remind

Copy and paste the following to a page to add the Share on Remind button to the site.

<a class="share-on-remind" href="https://www.remind.com/v1/share?url=<required_url_you_want_to_share>&referer=<required_source_page_url>&text=<optional_body_text>" target="_blank"></a>

Replace <required_url_you_want_to_share>, <required_source_page_url>, and <optional_body_text> with their respective values. Add the following styling:

.share-on-remind {
  display: block;
  width: 185px;
  height: 40px;
  background: url("https://assets.remind.com/eng/share-on-remind-button-with-text.png") no-repeat top;
  background-position: center top;
}

.share-on-remind:active {
  background-position: center bottom;
}

A button will appear that will look like this:

For additional examples, including iOS and Android sample code, visit the API documentation. You can also learn more about partnering on our Remind Developers platform.

What’s Next?

We’re excited to make the Remind communication platform more robust and useful for our teachers, parents, and students—and providing greater reach and exposure for other education and edtech companies means improving the learning experience for millions of students across the country.