Category: Parents

I was chatting with Mary over at the Dial My Calls site (click to see my review of Dial My Calls) and she had some great suggestions for  how teachers can use technology to stay in touch with parents:

A lot of emphasis has been given to getting parents involved in their child’s education, but with a teacher’s already full schedule and parents who are already stretched thin, this is not always easy to accomplish. Luckily, technology has intervened and come up with some very innovative solutions that make it quick and easy for a teacher to stay connected with parents.

Create A Class Website

Setting up a class website is a way for parents to see what is going on at their own convenience. It should feature a calendar that has highlighted all of the special events as well as test dates and special assignment due dates. It should only take the teacher a few moments to update the website and calendar weekly, adding in daily homework assignments, special announcements and achievements.

(more…)

Keeping parents informed about classroom activities is a challenge. They are busy with work, their children, and whatever personal life they can eke out of the sixteen hours that make up their waking day. The best method to reach them is with a short, pithy message that’s informative and easy to access.

Here are three tools educators agree do exactly that:

DialMyCalls

DialMyCalls is a quick, intuitive approach to sending messages to large (or small) groups in exactly the way they are comfortable getting them: on their phones. But rather than laboriously calling every number on your parent list–or entrusting an important communication to a phone tree–DialMyCalls sends out a recording you make via phone or text message.  It can detect whether the call is answered by a live person, voicemail, or an answering machines. Once the message is sent, it follows up with an email for those who prefer that approach.

Here’s how it works: Record the message and then send it out to either your entire phone list or a segment you identify. When you’re done, generate a report that tells you exactly what happened with each call.

Pros

If you’ve ever emailed an emergency message to parents and had a large percentage not receive it, you lived the reality that many people don’t check their email. Sure, eventually they do, but not always in the timely manner required of an emergency. What they do check is their phone, for calls or text messages. Using DialMyCalls means every parent gets the message in the quickest way possible. If they don’t have internet at home, they get the phone call. If they don’t carry their phone around, they get the email.

(more…)

At some point in your child’s education journey, you’re going to feel the need for tutoring. Riley Patterson, one of our Ask a Tech Teacher team has experience with this.  She’s a freelance writer who–in her free time–helps students with their homework. She lives in Illinois with her two-year-old Bridgette (who already knows how to count from one to ten) and a pet dog. Riley wrote a great summary of the critical elements to consider as you make that homework helper decision:

Online tutoring service has become very popular in recent years. The internet and the rapid technological improvement are making the world a little bit smaller and are eliminating barriers to learning. Students can now meet with private tutors, who are maybe from another country, through Skype, Google Hangouts, and other mobile communication applications. Online tutor or homework help companies even have their own website and own application for communication. Tutors, especially online, are now easy to find and easy to engage with. Numbers of online tutorial services are popping up everywhere on the internet these.

However, as parents how and when can you determine if your child needs extra help in their studies? Will you have your child be tutored even though they are doing okay in school? Alternatively, do you wait until their grades are already slipping down? Deciding whether your children need tutoring is a major family decision. Do you have the time to arrange a tutorial session for your child? Do you have the resources of financial capability to pay for the service? Would it really benefit your child? Will it affect their self-esteem? These are some of the questions that you need to answer when coming up when the decision whether or not hire a tutorial service for your child. Nevertheless, once you have made the decision to hire an online tutor, comes now another hurdle: How can you have the assurance that you are engaging the services of a legitimate and qualified tutor? Just like in any other services on the internet, the chances of encountering a scam artist are always there.

(more…)

Greeting cards are easy enough for second graders–even early readers. Using MS Publisher, pick a template, add a picture to personalize, add their name–and they’re done. It takes about 15 minutes. Kids always feel great about creating these greeting cards: (more…)

I’ve taught Preschool-8th grade for thirty years. Throughout, one factor stood out as the most reliable barometer of student achievement: Parent involvement. It didn’t mean parents as tutors, homework helpers, or classroom volunteers–although it could be those. It meant parents showing they cared about their child’s success.

Today’s education model is catching up with the fundamental part parents play in student achievement. In Massachusetts, for example, family and community engagement is one of four standards within its teacher-evaluation rubric.

If you’re looking for a way to involve parents more granularly in your classroom, try these three ideas:

(more…)

In fifteen years of teaching K-8, I have learned that one factor provides a reliable barometer for student success: Parent involvement. In fact, it’s crucial. According to the National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education Research Review and Resources, no matter income or background, students with involved parents are more likely to have higher grades and test scores, attend school regularly, have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school. According to the School Community Journal, “There is a sizable body of research literature supporting the involvement of parents in educational settings and activities”.

The data is so overwhelming, one of our important jobs as teachers must be to facilitate the involvement of parents in their child’s education. There are as many ways to do that as there are parents who need alternatives to the traditional parent-teacher conference and back-to-school night. Here are some of my favorites:

(more…)

I’m taking the day to honor our soldiers. Without their sacrifice, where would we be? (more…)

As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: I have a video on my classroom computer I want to use on my iPad. How do I do that?

A: There are ways to do that–email it to your iPad, open through DropBox–but those have issues:

• emailing requires extra steps and time you may not have
• many email accounts limit you to <10MB. What if a video file is larger?
• DropBox has limited space
• like email, you must put materials in DropBox to access them from there (I know–Duh, but that requires planning. What if your inquiry-driven class popped onto this topic on the fly?)

If you’re like me, anything to make your worker faster, easier, less steps is a good thing.

(more…)

Playful Learning (Parents’ Choice Gold Medal website) is a well-done, professional-looking website that  offers advice, projects, and visual images touting the benefits of education through play. The reader is drawn into the child-centered imagery and strong basic colors, wanting everything on offer so their child’s play areas can look and work as described.

Let’s back up a moment. Play as the vehicle of education is not a revolutionary idea. Pedagogy has long recommended ‘play’ as a superior teacher for youngers–

Play is the great synthesizing, integrating, and developing force in childhood and adolescence. –PsycINFO Database Record 2012 APA,

The play of children is not recreation; it means earnest work. Play is the purest intellectual production of the human being, in this stage … for the whole man is visible in them, in his finest capacities, in his innermost being.~ Friedrich Froebel

In general, research shows strong links between creative play and language, physical, cognitive, and social development. Play is a healthy, essential part of childhood. —Department of Education, Newfoundland Labrador

Young children learn the most important things not by being told but by constructing knowledge for themselves in interaction with the physical world and with other children – and the way they do this is by playing.” –Jones, E., & Reynolds, G.  “The play’s the thing: Teachers’ roles in children’s play”

(more…)

Greeting cards are easy enough for second graders–even early readers. Using MS Publisher, pick a template, add a picture to personalize, add their name–and they’re done. It takes about 15 minutes. Kids always feel great about creating these greeting cards: (more…)