Correction appended Oct. 19 As of the first weeks of the school year, parents and teachers at 35,000 schools nationwide have been communicating via text messages translated into 108 languages. The platform they use, created by the education technology nonprofit TalkingPoints, has seen a fifteen-fold…

Many teachers say they are struggling to connect with English-language learners at home, but are using high- and low-tech methods in an attempt to overcome the digital divide and other challenges.

Jay Subedi has been a contributing Syracuse community member for about 12 years. Now, Subedi runs his own home health care business and serves on various Syracuse boards and committees. English is Subedi’s second language after Nepali. It’s also the second language for his wife and two children. Fiv…

In light of school closures caused by COVID-19, millions of students are home for the remainder of the academic year. Philanthropy will play a vital role in the response to this crisis. But how can education funders and donors ensure that they are allocating their resources effectively?

Seven years ago, Google’s artificial intelligence technology was barely able to identify cat videos with passable precision. So what can its AI do today when it comes to tackling actual problems—say, famine, flooding, pollution and parent engagement?

Randomized evaluation of the TalkingPoints multilingual family engagement platform will assess the intervention’s impact on student achievement.

Communication, conversation, and relationships are the underpinnings of strong family-school partnerships. Yet, with over 350 languages spoken in U.S. homes today

Education technology non-profit will break down barriers to parent engagement by using AI to enable personalized coaching and improve two-way translated communication on its multilingual family engagement platform

Enabling a young mother to access essential nutrition benefits over text. Activating a high schooler’s passion for voting rights through digital engagement campaigns. Every day, nonprofit organizations create innovative communication solutions to reach people where they are and deliver services central to their programs. Twilio.org partners with social impact organizations around the world to build and scale these life changing communications.

Heejae Lim, founder of TalkingPoints, an app that translates text messages from educators into a parent’s home language, likes to tell a story of a San Francisco middle school principal. The administrator wanted to connect with the parents of a Spanish-speaking student at risk of failing. He tried visiting the family at home twice, to no avail.

Today, I chat with Heejae Lim, founder of TalkingPoints, a messaging app used by 150,000 families and teachers in over 3,000 schools that aims to improve parent-teacher communication—especially for parents who are non-English speakers.

TalkingPoints is an education technology nonprofit working to make it easy for any parent to be engaged in their children’s education—especially in low-income, diverse communities. Through a parent education platform with human- and AI-powered translation, we help teachers and parents communicate, build relationships, and understand what effective parent engagement looks like.

Language and cultural barriers are familiar ground to me. As a Korean who grew up in England and then moved to the US, I’ve encountered plenty of challenges in cultural and language translation. But today I’m becoming less and less of an anomaly. Minorities will make up more than 50% of the United States population by 2020.

TalkingPoints is a nonprofit, and our mission is to unlock the potential of low-income, immigrant families in the U.S. to be able to support their children’s learning.

Utah-based Pluralsight’s Create the Future Awards recognize companies changing the world for the better. We met two of them: one teaches tech skills to human-trafficking victims, while another helps bridge language barriers between parents and teachers.

One in four children in the United States is born to an immigrant family, according to the Casey Foundation, and there will be 40 million children born to immigrant or underserved families by 2030. These children are becoming one of the fastest growing student demographics, with states in the South and Southeast seeing the number of English Language Learner students double year after year. Yet school systems, educators, and communities are not adequately prepared or resourced for this pace of change.

We’ve all heard the theory that the most successful businesses have one thing in common: They identify a problem that people have and they solve it. If only it were that simple.

Kids growing up in low-income neighborhoods have always faced extra challenges when it comes to keeping up with their middle- to high-income peers. And with the dawning of the digital age, low-income students now face a new, unprecedented challenge: access to high-speed internet.

Predictions for the potential of artificial intelligence wax poetic — solutions from climate change to curing disease — but the everyday applications make it seem far more mundane, like a glorified clock radio.

The following piece is based on a conversation we recently had with Heejae Lim, Founder and Executive Director of TalkingPoints. As a Korean immigrant student, Heejae saw first-hand the difference between her friends with English-speaking parents who were deeply engaged in their education versus non-English speaking parents who struggled to be involved.

As a parent, I can’t even begin to describe how important I think home to school/school to home communication is for my sanity and my child’s success. My son is a bit of a mad scientist, which is all well and good, but have you seen the inside of a mad scientist’s backpack?

Strong parent-teacher partnerships are key to student success in the classroom. In fact, parental engagement is very effective at predicting student achievement. When teachers and parents are in regular contact about students’ needs, progress, and successes, students feel supported and motivated to try their best in school.

STEM is high on the mind of the folks over at AT&T Aspire Accelerator. Three of the six teams selected to participate in its second six-month accelerator program aim to help students code and explore science careers.

As the largest competition of its kind, the EBPC features multiple cash prizes totaling $140,000, and awards prizes in two categories – one aimed at Idea-stage companies that are just getting started and Ventures, which already have revenues, grants, customers, or investments.

More than 1 million users. Sixteen billion monthly page views. Ninety-nine percent user engagement. If these sound like stats from tech companies, you’re right. Except these tech companies are nonprofits.

San Francisco-based nonprofit TalkingPoints announced yesterday the launch of a centralized school-wide platform designed to help school officials communicate with all of the families they serve, regardless of language barriers.

Parental engagement is twice as likely to influence a student’s long-term success as socioeconomic status, some studies say, but when parents struggle to engage because of language limitations, it creates a big barrier between home and school.

From an early age, Heejae Lim recognized her parents’ ability to speak English allowed them to engage with her school life in a way that non-English-speaking parents could not.

Last year, in several separate conversations with educators, the subject of tools for English Language Learners (ELLs) came up. We discussed it as a team, and wondered if it was a trend we should be paying closer attention to.

Last week, The NewSchools Venture Fund announced the winners of a funding competition designed to find the best edtech tools that are helping English Language Learners (ELLs) learn.

Amanda Roman, an English as a second language teacher in Elmsford, used to have to translate handwritten Spanish notes from students’ parents for her colleagues.

Google wants Bay Area residents to pick the groups with the best ideas for transforming local lives. Google.org, the search giant’s philanthropic arm, is seeking public input on its Google Impact Challenge grants to “change-makers and forward-thinkers who challenge the status quo … with big ideas for an even better Bay Area,” as it says on its website.

First, it was parent-teacher communication by texting. Now, ClassDojo and Remind seem to be in a race to share information with parents in whatever native language they speak.

At a demo day in San Francisco on Wednesday, Joyce Kim’s presentation of her financial tech startup sounded a lot like a tech startup pitching venture capitalists for funding. She scrolled through a slide deck and stood at a podium, sporting a t-shirt of her startup.

Language barriers don’t exist in a vacuum. Let’s say a parent can’t communicate in English with their kid’s teacher, and that teacher only speaks English. The problem at hand isn’t just a translation issue. It’s a language barrier that limits the parent’s ability to participate in their child’s education, and limits the child’s development.