Gemoo

What is Gemoo app?

Gemoo is a toolset for capturing and combining you, your screen, and your voice to produce clear and engaging messages. It is a general-purpose web-based tool with applications for many roles and situations, but in this review, we're looking at it as a school-to-home communication platform.

Teachers can use Gemoo to inform parents, support kids, and enrich the school community. There are four main aspects to using Gemoo:

Creation - Gemoo's message creation tools are perfect for providing newsletter-like information to parents, explaining homework assignments, previewing the week's lesson topics and anything else teachers need to do.

As you can easily incorporate and create different media types, you can tailor each newsletter to its purpose. Record your explanations along with your visual aids to support homework tasks, or record a greeting from your camera to put new students at ease before they join your first class.

Organisation - Being well-organised can save teachers a lot of time and effort. Gemoo provides practical tools for organising messages and topics. Spaces act like a folder for a selection of topics. You could have a space named after your class and a topic for each child where you store anything relevant to them, such as photos and videos.

You can use mind maps, slides and calendar tools to help structure everything in a way that makes sense to you and how you work.

Storing - Your content, messages, and newsletters will be preserved and easy to find. This will make it easy for teachers to repurpose pre-made content, provide a record of classroom activity for inspection purposes, and be a great source of material for classroom look-backs at the end of the school year.

Share - You share your creations with a single link and can password-protect them. You can send the links using whatever method suits you, whether an existing school-to-home communication platform or email lists. You'll see the number of times each message is viewed. Parents can comment on each post if you permit them, and a like-button function is on the app's roadmap for imminent introduction.

You've probably considered or used some of the school/parent communication apps out there, such as Seesaw, Canvas, ClassDojo and SkoolLoop. Gemoo isn't like these but can be used with them. It focuses on the school-to-parent part of communications, making your messages, newsletters, and more look fabulous.

Using some of the above tools or a non-dedicated service creates messages that look no more than functional when you compare them to how engaging, attractive, and clear Gemoo makes your content appear.

What we love about Gemoo app.

School/parent communication services have evolved to become essential tools. Instead of relying on kids to remember messages and carry paper-based documents, these services provide accuracy, reliability and efficiency.

Gemoo isn't a dedicated school/parent communication app as it has use cases for different sectors, but its features remain ideal for schools. They also add something less prevalent in school-focused services: visual clarity and attractiveness.

Whether sending weekly newsletters, homework assignments, reminders or anything else, the communications produced in Gemoo look great. Being visually pleasing makes it more likely for the intended recipient to read them, and their clarity makes them easy to understand.

You can combine text, images, video and audio in your school communication. The flexibility to choose and combine these options ensures you use the best method for the message you want to transmit. 

The different forms of media you can use also enable you to adapt your content to meet the accessibility needs of members of your school community. Audio-based messages will be beneficial for those with visual impairments.

What skills does it teach?

Gemoo is helpful for schools, other educational organisations, and community groups but is not a direct educational tool. However, it should support their educational efforts by making communication more attractive and effective for the service's users.

What age is it appropriate for?

For this review of Gemoo, we focus on its use as a tool for school staff and teachers to communicate with the broader school community.

Is Gemoo app easy to use?

Ease of use has clearly been one of the pillars on which Gemoo has been built. Building up different communications is easy. The app's responses guide you to appropriate options, and the tool interactions are intuitive. If you've used any presentation-style software before, you'll have no problem learning to use this app and will be able to produce useful communications as you learn.

Gemoo has two free tools to download and use separately to your account. One is a screen recorder, and the other is a screenshot app. These are worth checking, even if you already use a different app. You might find that, while they have fewer features than other apps, they have all you need but are easier to use with more straightforward tools for improving your screen captures.

To ease you in, the app has a quick-start video and a short list of tasks that lead you through the features.

You can create the content you need within the app, such as recording your screen, and if your device has the necessary capture devices, use your webcam or microphone. Alternatively, you can upload from other sources or link to already-uploaded files through a URL.

Parents have an even easier job. They see familiar tools and interaction options when they receive access to the communications you send. Playing videos, listening to audio, and leaving comments are the same as on any website or social media app.

How will students benefit?

Students are not great conveyors of information. They forget to mention important details, lose written messages, and tend to assume everything will be put right at the last moment.

Cutting them out of the communication loop makes everything run smoother. 

With better-informed parents, kids won't arrive at school unequipped for a special event. Rule changes or more stringent enforcement will be less likely to catch kids off guard as their parents will have known.

Gemoo also helps kids feel that their efforts are recognised. Teachers can use the app to open a window into their classroom for parents to see what has been going and how their child has contributed.

While this is a great week-by-week tool, it is also, almost as a by-product, building up a wonderful archive of the school year for parents and kids to look back upon.

How will parents benefit?

Designers, typesetters, and artists know the importance of appearance in attracting an audience. Plain, cluttered, or poorly laid out elements on a page take more effort to read and understand than attractive, well-spaced ones.

Some school communication, particularly if it features their little ones, is interesting, but some, despite its importance, is less so. Plain messages risk being only skimmed or, worse, dismissed entirely.

When they receive an attractive weekly newsletter or message, parents are more likely to want to read it, making them better informed and less likely to be caught out by surprises.

How will teachers benefit?

It is common for apps designed for multiple industries not to take complete account of their use in educational settings. The unique dynamic of schools means that app features have different benefits and purposes for teachers compared to business users.

This app addresses schools as much as it does other sectors.

Gemoo's use case section of its website has a page dedicated to education. This detailed and informative page includes ideas, guides, and more to help you understand what the service offers. This information is excellent to ensure busy teachers know it is worth investing their time into learning and incorporating the app into their school's communication flow.

Schools don't produce communication to tick boxes. It serves the important purpose of involving parents. With engaged parents, schools can help children learn and be happy. 

Producing newsletters and messages serves no purpose if parents don't read them, and the functional but plain message formats used by other apps don't tend to have many visual pulls for a reader. Gemoo will give you a new workflow if you aren't using an existing service or enhance your present communication tool, which won't require any extra effort. 

Creating attractive multimedia communication is probably no more difficult with Gemoo than with your existing tools. You'll be able to see if Gemoo is providing value for your school as it tracks how many have viewed each item and, if you permit it, allows feedback.

What can Gemoo app improve on?

As you'll see in the section of this review dealing with the app's cost, it is in beta and free, at the moment.

What will happen when the app is not in beta is currently ambiguous. We're sure some level of service will continue in the future for free-tier users because this is a typical approach of service-style apps, and the app has 'Free Forever' on its links. This doesn't tell us what limits might exist in the future.

The current status is like an extended trial and excellent for learning and trying Gemoo without restriction, but teachers will likely want to know that their school can afford to keep a subscription in the future should they invest the time in learning and establishing the app.

It isn't immediately obvious that the app treats recording audio alone as creating a video without a camera. To record from the screen, camera, or mic, the first step is to click "Create a Video". Once you know, it is easy to remember but not quite in line with user expectations.

How much does Gemoo app cost?

During this review of Gemoo, the service is in beta. This status means its features, stability, and workflow are close to the final version but still being refined. In this case, it also means that Gemoo is 100% free.

It is unclear how this will change when the app leaves its beta status behind, as the sign-up page states that you 'get free access to all features of Gemoo while in beta'. The buttons that link to the sign-up page state, 'Free Forever', so we would expect some level of its service to remain for all users

Is Gemoo app safe to use?

Teachers and other school staff will create and control the content within Gemoo. At the time of this review, the app did not feature advertising.

You opt to allow feedback, such as comments, to each item you post. 

If you choose to host or use the content on third-party services, such as videos on YouTube, they may feature advertisements or other links beyond the control of Gemoo.

As Gemoo makes it so easy to share images and videos, you'll likely want to share classroom moments, but you must keep your school policies in mind. Depending on your region or school, it may not be permissible to post images of a student for access by other parents.

Gemoo's website states that it uses encryption to protect your data. Check that it matches what is acceptable by your school's policies.

Overall rating of the app.

Gemoo provides an excellent layer of organisation, convenience, and creativity to processes that teachers already frequently undertake. After a little familiarisation with the app's tools, it will likely save time while producing higher-quality messages.

Gemoo is easiest to understand when you use it and see how the toolset and organisational features come together. Especially while the app is in beta and entirely free to access, we recommend you give the app a try. The only form of vendor lock-in you might feel is the reluctance to give up the advantages provided by Gemoo.