linGrow

North America is becoming more and more linguistically diverse. Communication breakdown can occur when families and teachers do not speak the same language. Good parent-teacher communication is essential for keeping parents involved and to support their children's academic success.

linGrow is a free multilingual mobile application that helps multilingual families communicate with teachers. linGrow's features include a built-in translator to receive and send written and voice messages as well as videos and photos for clear communication.

linGrow can be expanded globally to increase parent-teacher communication and improve children's language development. It can ultimately help multilingual families have equitable access to parent-teacher communication.

In Canada and the United States, around 21% of the population speak a minority language at home. Children who speak a minority language have weaker communication skills in the language of instruction at school, which leads to challenges in building relationships with their teachers and peers. In addition, many multilingual parents face a language barrier when communicating with their child’s teachers. Parents can find it difficult to understand the information sent by teachers, complete suggested activities, support their children’s learning, and advocate for their children’s needs. COVID-19 restrictions can exacerbate these communication issues. These barriers can discourage parents from being involved in their children's education, which can cause further disadvantages.

The linGrow mobile application is free and multilingual. IinGrow aims to support and encourage multilingual families’ communication with their children’s teachers. This mobile application is available for iOS and Android smartphones. linGrow includes built-in translations, voicemails and voice-overs to increase accessibility. This application will help overcome the language barriers faced by multilingual families. This mobile application also has a dyslexia-friendly font for inclusivity and includes tips on how to use simple language to improve the accuracy of translations and differences in reading abilities. The linGrow mobile application has individual accounts for teachers and families. This mobile application can capture, send, and share videos and photos. It uses strong security features to ensure data privacy between users.

Our target population is multilingual families who are not fluent in the primary language used at school. Up to 21% of Canadians and Americans speak a language other than English at home and may benefit from this mobile application. Research shows that communication is challenging for parents who are not proficient in English. Means of communication already in place, such as in-person, written documents, or emails, do not always account for language barriers with interpreters or translations due to a lack of resources. To better understand the needs of our target population, we are collaborating with a local non-profit organization that provides preschool services to more than 700 children in Edmonton. More than 70% of these children speak a language other than English at home. We are collaborating with them to understand the perspectives of teachers and parents with regards to multilingual communication, for example, with the completion of interviews. They will work with us to pilot the software.

This mobile application will help teachers communicate with students and their families in remote and hybrid settings. In particular, linGrow provides teachers with another means of communication that can help overcome the language barrier with parents and that can be used remotely. Ensuring more teacher-parent communication will help teachers learn more about their students, personalize their instruction, and adapt their pedagogy for each student. Together this will improve students’ success and parent involvement.

Our current stage of development is a prototype for the mobile application linGrow. We are currently in the process of testing the prototype mobile application with different community organizations, e.g., ABC Head Start Society and school boards. We aim to complete usability testing with 30 future users including multilingual families, teachers, and researchers.

Our solution is innovative because other applications that are similar to linGrow do not offer all of the features in a single application. These features include the ability to capture and send videos, receive videos, send and receive photos, integrated translations, voice-over, send voice messages, data security, and iOS and Android compatibility. In addition, our goal is to make linGrow available to families without a fee. Being able to send and receive videos will allow teachers to demonstrate activities to complete at home, parents to complete the activity while recording themselves, and teachers to provide feedback to parents on the activity after assessing the video recordings. With the integrated translations, parents can read or hear the message in their preferred language to overcome the language barrier. The voice-over and voice message features will improve parent-teacher communication for parents who have low literacy skills. The photos will help show, for example, the material needed for activity or updates of what is happening in the classroom. The security of data will ensure safe and private communications. The iOS and Android compatibility will increase the accessibility to most families and teachers. In addition, we are aiming for a free mobile application to be more accessible to community organizations.

We currently operate in Canada and will be operating in Canada next year. We are currently at the prototype stage, so we are not serving any families at the moment, but will test our solution with 30 people. The solution will serve around 100 families and their teachers next year. In five years, we aim to serve around 5000 families and their teachers.

The short-term measurable indicators to measure our progress would be an increase in effectiveness and frequency of communication between multilingual parents and teachers. This includes the number of multilingual families reached. The long-term measurable indicator would be better parental involvement leading to better academic outcomes of multilingual children to help achieve quality education for all and to reduce inequities of education towards multilingual families. This includes the number of families reached and the improved performance of the multilingual children.

Three members of the team are part of the University of Alberta and four members are part of the University of Calgary. The leaders of our team are researchers based at the University of Alberta where the solution started. We are using research funds to support the salaries of research assistants in our team.

There are nine people working on our solution team. We are two part-time staff, three contractors and four volunteers. We all have different expertise regarding content, mobile application design and development, marketing, and fundraising.

The majority of our team members are multilingual, and many grew up in a family where a language barrier existed with regards to parent-teacher communication. Therefore, we can place ourselves in the families’ shoes; not being able to communicate and being involved as much as they would want to in their children’s learning. Since our team members have diverse personal experiences, we have been able to approach the problem from a creative perspective to find an accessible and relevant solution that meets multilingual families’ needs. In addition, one team member is a parent and thus can actively acknowledge the different ways to communicate with teachers and the applications or mobile applications currently used. Our unique team’s experience and backgrounds help guide our mobile application design, development, and implementation. Our team members have complementary expertise including research with multilingual families, mobile application design, prototyping, programming, and graphic design and communications.

Our team is developing a solution to address the needs of linguistically diverse families for teacher-parent communication. We aim to reduce inequities experienced by multilingual children with regard to the quality of education. We are devoted to providing an inclusive education setting to all families. In our leadership team, our superpowers are our languages and cultures. For example, during our team meetings, we use team members’ experiences and backgrounds as strengths to build a relevant mobile application. Our philosophy is that we believe in excellence via equality, diversity, and inclusivity. For example, we point out how to be inclusive for every aspect of our mobile application such as the accessibility of the font used, the voice-over and voicemail features for parents with low literacy skills.

We hope to overcome barriers with respect to technology accessibility and financial barriers for the maintenance of our mobile application. With this grant, we hope to lend mobile phones to families in need and use the grant money for the salaries of student team members that will complete maintenance of our mobile application in the next few years.

Most of us have experience in seeking financial support through grants or fundraisers. However, we lack experience with seeking financial support through other means such as investors. In addition, some team members have expertise and experience in software and app development and design. However, we would like to have more mentorship to push our mobile application to its full potential.

We would like to explore a partnership with Talking Points to explore integrating features and provide the mobile application free of charge for our testing with our partnered organizations. linGrow and Talking Points both provide similar solutions with a common goal to increase parent-teacher communication for multilingual families. In addition, a partnership would help benefit more families and teachers outside the US, such as Canada in our case. With our team having access to many organizations, we would be able to help this Solve Member by gathering feedback on our merged mobile application with many new families and teachers in the province of Alberta in Canada. This partnership would help address Talking Points’ barriers of partnering with organizations to give product feedback and for international expansion. We would benefit each other, work together for larger distribution and a mobile application that addresses more needs and impacts more families.

Our mobile app for communication between multilingual families and teachers includes refugee families. The increased communication between teachers and families will help integrate refugee families as well for better parental involvement leading to better children's outcomes.

Our mobile app will help to have accessible and equitable teacher-parent communication for all families, including multilingual families from immigration and refugee families. This will help to be more inclusive of children and their parents regarding parental involvement leading to better academic success.

We would like to be considered as we are using a mobile application to increase our impact on multilingual families.

We would like to be considered as we are using a mobile application to increase our impact on multilingual families.

Our mobile app will help reach multilingual families of our local communities in Edmonton and in Calgary. There is an important need for better communication between parents and teachers that are not speaking the same language for increased parental involvement. This will in turn help support multilingual children's success.