The May before last, I chaperoned my son’s class trip to the aquarium, and I spent a good part of the ride there answering texts from parents who weren’t on the bus. Where are you now? Did you stop somewhere? I had the head count clipboard on my knees and my phone in my hand, typing “almost there!” with one thumb while a boy named Theo tried to open the emergency window behind me (he did not succeed, and yes, I wrote it down).
None of those parents were being unreasonable. I’ve been on the other side of it, at my desk on a field trip day when my daughter was little, refreshing the class group chat every few minutes because the last thing anyone had posted was a photo of the bus leaving the parking lot. There’s an essay on this blog about why parents refresh their phones for hours on field trip day, and I recognized myself in most of it, which was a little embarrassing.
This spring I sent the parents a live map link they could open in their browser instead. The texts dropped to almost nothing (one dad still messaged to ask if the link was working, and it was).
What I set up the morning of the trip
When people hear “track the bus” they picture a box wired under the dashboard, and there isn’t one. Nothing goes on the bus and the school doesn’t install anything. The map follows the phone of someone on the bus who has the app open and is part of a trip.
That person should not be the driver. Our driver had enough going on, and I don’t want anyone touching a phone at the wheel to keep parents updated. A chaperone sitting a few rows back is the right choice, as long as that chaperone has an Android phone, because the Konvoyage app is Android only. Parents can be on anything. The link opens in a regular browser on an iPhone or on the laptop at work, and nobody on that end needs the app or an account.
For a single bus, the quickest way is Share my drive. In the app you tap the plus button, pick “Share my drive,” type a name for it and the destination in the “Where to?” box, and tap “Start sharing.” Android’s share sheet pops up and you send the link wherever you’d normally send it. I pasted it into the class messaging app the school already uses, with one line explaining what it was. You do have to be signed in to make the link, which is just picking your Google account on the phone (there’s no password to type, which I appreciated that early with coffee in the other hand).
Then I hit the snag I hadn’t thought through.
The arrival time parents see is for the destination you set, and on the way there I’d set the aquarium. The parents doing pickup wanted to know when the bus would be back at school, and if you set a destination on Share my drive it ends when you get there, so my morning link stopped at the aquarium parking lot. If you’re doing this, plan for two links: one for the morning, if parents even want it, and a second one started in the aquarium lot before the bus pulls out, with the school as the destination. I sent the second link while the kids were still finding their seats, with “this is the one for pickup” in big letters, and that was the link people actually used. If I’d only had one link to send, I’d have skipped the morning entirely and sent just the return one.
You can leave the destination blank, and then it runs for a few hours and stops on its own. Parents lose the arrival time that way, though, and that was the thing they wanted.
Two buses, one map
When our grade went to the science center a few weeks ago, there were two buses, and Share my drive is for one person. So I created a trip instead and gave the other bus chaperone the code. She signed in, typed it in, and her name was already filled in. Once she’d joined, either of us could tap the trip name at the top of the map and pick “Share live view,” and that single link showed both buses. The one thing I’d do differently: the dots are labelled with each chaperone’s first name, so parents saw “Mel” and “Priya” moving around and had no idea which one was their kid’s bus. Put which name is on which bus right in the message with the link, or you will get texts asking.
What parents actually see on their end
They tap the link and get a map. Each person in the trip is a dot with their first name next to it, there’s a pin on the destination, and the arrival shows as a clock time, something like “arrives 2:40.” If a chaperone’s phone loses signal, which happened to us on the stretch past the quarry, the page says “no signal” for that person instead of leaving a frozen dot sitting there looking fine.
The names on the map belong to whoever is in the trip, so the chaperones. No student names, nothing about the kids. Parents can’t send anything from the page, and they can’t join the trip from it. The page isn’t indexed by search engines either, so it doesn’t turn up for someone searching the school’s name.
There is a limit I’d want to know about before promising this to a whole grade. A trip’s live view handles up to about 20 viewers. For one class that was plenty, since not every family opened it. For a grade of several classes all watching one trip, it won’t be, so if that’s your situation, each bus could run its own trip with its own link and send it only to that bus’s families.
The live map stops when someone taps End trip or when the trip length you picked runs out. It also stops if the person who shared it leaves the trip. Any member can also tap “Stop live view,” which stops every link for that trip at once.
Before you try this on an official school trip
I didn’t decide this on my own. A chaperone, even a teacher, usually can’t bring a new app onto a school trip without the district knowing about it. Most districts have some kind of review for tools that touch anything student-related, and a map showing where a bus full of kids is right now will get questions from someone in IT or the front office, even though no student information goes into it.
What helped in our case was going through the PTA first instead of emailing the principal cold. A parent group asking about pickup logistics got a friendlier hearing than I would have alone. When the district’s tech person wanted details, I sent them the privacy page and pointed out the specifics. Location is only collected while a trip is running, saved location points are deleted after about 30 days, and the basic trip details (the trip name, code, destination and member list) are kept for 24 months. The app has no ads and doesn’t sell data. They had follow-up questions, which I couldn’t all answer, and the approval took longer than I expected, so if you want this for a spring trip, don’t start asking in April.
Plenty of outings never go near a district office, and those are an easier place to start. Our Scout troop’s drive to a weekend campout was the first time I used it, and I was the one deciding. Having used it there made the PTA conversation much shorter, because I could pull up a real link on my phone and show people what they’d see instead of describing it.
The night before
Do a test run at home. I made a trip with my husband the evening before, shared the live view, and had him open the link on his work laptop at the kitchen table while I drove around the block. If he could see my dot and the arrival time, I knew the link part worked. If he couldn’t, I’d still have had a whole evening to sort it out instead of finding out in the school parking lot.
Charge the phone fully and pack a power bank. Mine is an Anker PowerCore, and I keep the cable rubber-banded to it so it can’t go missing in my bag. The phone sharing location is going to be working all day, and you’ll be using it for photos and head counts too.
Write the message to parents ahead of time and save it as a draft. Mine said what the link was, that it would show the chaperones’ first names and the bus, that the arrival time was for school, and that a “no signal” label meant a dead zone and not an emergency. In the morning all I had to do was paste the link in and hit send.