Great article by Heather Alexander of Knoxnews reviews a couple of websites that help parents and teachers organize activities, volunteers and group gifts.
"I've never been a room mom. And though I support my daughter, her teacher and our school, I have NO desire to be the point person for the classroom.
I'm disorganized, and I know it. I try to overcome it by hunting down tools that make organizing things easier.
Recently, I have come across two really useful websites.
SignUpGenius is a free website that helps parents stay organized by signing up electronically for duties.
You can sign up for an account at www.signupgenius.com, enter a list of email addresses for the parents of classmates or members of a team. Once you have that, you can invite the people on your list to sign up for things.
For example, a teacher could use it to set up parent-teacher conferences, a room mother could use it to organize parents to be the weekly mystery reader, and parents of kids who play sports could use the site to organize snacks and drinks for practices and games. It even has reminders that automatically get sent out prior to the commitment.
SignUpGenius was created by a dad who organized a church function where the food and drink sign-ups went horribly wrong. "I kept thinking to myself ... there has got to be a better way. So I set out to create one," said SignUpGenius founder Dan Rutledge.
The other helpful site is www.FrumUs.com.
I had never heard of it until recently when I got an invitation to contribute to a gift for A. L. Lotts Elementary School's third-grade teacher and cross country coach Jessica Greer.
I clicked on the link and discovered the site provides a way to collect money online from a group of people for a gift.
To use the site, you establish an account and add an email list. Then you can start a collection and invite people from your email list to give to the group gift.
There are no fees for this and no minimum amount required. The money that is collected can be used to purchase gifts or gift cards from the company's website, which includes dozes of retailers such as Amazon, Gap and Walmart.
This would be a great tool to collect for a group gift to a teacher and would work for a birthday or for a shower gift as well.
A mom created this site after she realized no one had collected money to get a gift for her son's baseball coach at the end of the season.
So, the ingenuity of one mom and one dad are meeting the very real needs of disorganized parents everywhere. And I, for one, am grateful."
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