Celebrating a year of making teacher-student connections stronger

Our team is on a mission to help educators connect with students more easily – and we’re excited about all the ways we’ve supported our school communities this past semester! From new product features to new content, Along is here to help deepen connections so that teachers and students can thrive together in the classroom.  

As we look ahead to 2023, we’re taking a pause and reflecting on how Along has helped our educator community in 2022. Check out some of our favorite highlights:

Awards, accolades, and recognitions

Keeping safety and privacy at the forefront
In August, Along earned the iKeepSafe FERPA and COPPA privacy badges. We’ve always prioritized the protection of children’s personal information and we designed Along to keep student information safe, secure, and private. Student data privacy is at the core of everything we do.

Common Sense Education
Along was named a 2022 ‘Best Tool for Back to School’ by Common Sense Education. Along is among the five tools for emotional wellbeing highlighted in Common Sense Education’s list. 

TIME Best Inventions 2022
Along received a special mention on TIME’s Best Inventions 2022 list. Every year, TIME recognizes products, software and services that are solving compelling problems in creative ways across all categories, including technology, beauty, health care, food, home and entertainment. 

New features make Along even easier to use

Grouping
With grouping, you can organize students in smaller groups in order to send and view reflections by student group. Grouping makes it more manageable to communicate amongst larger classes.

Stickers
Now you can acknowledge student responses by replying with a sticker that has a variety of fun and colorful English and Spanish language options.

Connect codes
It’s now even easier to get your students on Along. Once you sign in to Along, you’ll have access to your connect code. You can then share your code with students through email, a messaging app, etc.

Weekly recommendations
Each week, we’re now curating a selection of timely reflection questions tailored to meet teacher and student needs throughout the school year. 

Favoriting
You can “Favorite” collections, questions, classroom activities, or educator practices so they can quickly navigate back to them. 

Multi-teacher per student
Along now has the ability for students to reflect with more than one teacher, allowing for more connectivity and relationship-building at school.

New content gives teachers more choices

Re-imagining Migration, Character Lab, and Unidos reflection questions:
At the core of Along is our reflection questions, classroom activities, and teacher resources. We purposefully focus on working with partners that can bring diversity, promote inclusivity, and share engaging, relevant topics with students and teachers. This year, we added reflection questions from Re-imagining Migration centered on heritage, family, and belonging, as well as questions about student well-being from Character Lab and questions from UnidosUS focused on rest and joy.

We hope these updates and features help you use Along more seamlessly with your students—and we can’t wait for what 2023 has in store. Happy connecting!