Edutopia: Tech-Enhanced Parent Engagement
By Nicholas Provenzano / August 30, 2016http://www.edutopia.org/blog/tech-enhanced-parent-engagement-nicholas-provenzano
Key Points:
Parents and teachers should be working together to ensure student success. The best way to increase parent engagement is through strong communication. Whether it's email, messaging apps, an active website, or virtual office hours, technology helps you keep parents in the loop about what's happening in their child's classroom. Once a teacher sets up a strong communication network, parent engagement will increase and students will benefit in the long run.
These are just some of the ways to increase parent engagement;
Email
Sending e-mails to parents can keep parents engaged, allowing them to stay informed in class activities or allow for more student-specific matters.
Remind
Remind is a quick text messaging system that allows teachers to send text messages to user who have signed up. This is an easy way for directly sharing information in a timely matter.
Website
A frequently-updated website is always available for parents to access and find information that may answer their questions instead of waiting on a text message or e-mail. It is also a useful tool that keep parents informed and have access to what is going on in their child’s classroom.
Virtual Office Hours
Skype, Google and Hangouts are a great way to have face-to-face conversations with ease. Many times parents schedules prevent them from these face-to-face meetings but video chat allows for this kind of interaction without parents having to physically make it to school within a designated time. This also allows for parents to stay in the loop despite their location.
Relevance
Communication and collaboration between teachers and parents is an essential to ensure the success of our students. Understanding the importance of this relationship and utilizing tools that create an easy way to communicate allow for parents to be involved and engaged in their child’s education and develop more meaningful communication and collaboration.
Kate,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this post because as technology becomes a bigger part of education, parents are expecting more lines of communication or options for how to communicate with the teacher. Today I was sitting in on conferences and one of the parent's requested a Skype conference because she wants to be up to date on what their child needs to work on but also could not miss work. All of these new options allow parents to be involved while being able to maintain work as well.
I appreciate how the article points out the importance of parent and teacher communication. As you suggest, this can help ensure student success. School can be a place they feel valued and connected to. The teacher I work with actually started communicating with parents through the “remind app.” It has been a helpful tool and an effective way to communicate with parents. We have found that more parents have been responsive, engaged, and appreciate the app. Yes, some matters need to be dealt with over the phone, through video calls, or in person, but I have seen the benefit of giving or receiving quick information, as many parents use their cell phones during the day.
ReplyDeleteThe Author seemed to stick to tech based methods for involving parents in the classroom, however even in todays world their are still a lot of families that don't have regular access to these platforms. Though these can work really well for quick and easy communication with those that have access, it can exclude and further divide those that don't. What we really need is more parent buy in to the importance of education and to eliminate the reasoning "I send my child to school so I don't get arrested". Because believe it or not that still exists and will be a major problem until dealt with.
ReplyDelete