Parent Ping is a daily survey app that helps you learn how other parents are dealing with life – without all the usual hassles of social media!
What’s the story?
For years the team at Teacher Tapp, a similar (and very popular) app for teachers have wondered if what is happening in school is reflected at home. For example, teachers say that pupils are given homework – but do parents see it being done?
During lockdown, this need is even more pressing. What is going on in living rooms? Are parents wading through pages of printed documents sent by schools? Are they hoping ipad videos are enough to get through the day? And when teachers say they think the majority of pupils are doing less than 2 hours of work a day, are they correct?
Thankfully, the charity grant organisation BIG CHANGE saw this huge need and have given us the cash to build Parent Ping, an app that will ping on parent phones once per day so we gather all this info and find out the true picture of what it’s like to be a parent.
When is this happening?
The team are frantically racing to build the app so that it will be ready for launch asap.
How will it work?
Easy! Once it is live, download the free Parent Ping app from your phone’s app store.
Each day your phone will PING! and sends at least 2 questions for you to answer. You can decide how many of your children you’d like to answer questions about, and we aim to make the whole thing as easy and simple as possible.
Once answered you get to see the answers from yesterday. Did other parents agree or disagree? Easy graphs show you how ‘normal’ your answers are!
Finally, you are rewarded with badges, points and a daily read about some aspect of parenting. If you know any great blogs or topics we should feature, please let us know.
Who can join in?
Parent Ping will be of most relevance to parents of children in education, from nursery to university, but that doesn’t mean you can’t join in if you are interested… you just might not be able to answer all of the questions (but there will always be a ‘not applicable’ option). As the app develops we will be able to target the questions (and the tips) to your particular circumstance, so the more you use it the more useful it will be.
We know that families and parents come in all shapes and sizes and hold no preconceptions about that. If you have parental responsibility for at least one child then this app is for you!
What are the benefits?
Do you ever wonder if you’re doing or thinking what other parents are doing or thinking? And you’d like to find out without wading into yet another parent WhatsApp group or facing the humble brags on Facebook? Parent Ping enables you to quickly give your views and learn what others think, without worries about trolling, spelling mistakes or having to be diplomatic about not offending others!
Also, no one is a perfect parent. We all need to learn how to do the role as best as we can. The daily reads help you learn about new ideas and ways of improving your relationship with your child(ren) and helping them get as much out of education as possible. (Though on some days it will just be a blog about how hard things are, because some days that’s just how parenting is).
What will you ask me?
We will ask you about what life is like as a parent, this will often mean asking your views about your child’s education such as ‘how regularly does your child receive homework?’ or ‘how did you decide which school your child should attend?’ But we’ll also cover the other stuff that parents do, like deciding what time bedtime should be (and what time it really is) or how much screen time is allowed.
But please know, we are not interested in what brand of toothpaste you buy or where you do the weekly shop! We do not want to create a product survey, we want to make an app that is truly informative for parenting life.
What do you do with my data?
We use the answers from each of the surveys to share results back to you, on a weekly blog (so you can see analysis of results), and with organisations who are trying to find out what parents think.
BUT – and this is really important – all data is centrally held by us. We don’t share individual results or personal data with third-party companies. We take privacy seriously and do our utmost to protect confidentiality, which is why we ask you to give your child a nickname (not their real name), and only ask for the minimum amount of information on sign-up that we need to support the research. We have a strict privacy policy and you can request that we delete your personal data at any time.