This Teacher Texts. When I left the Google Teacher Academy in July, one tool I was anxious to try out with my students was Google Voice. For those of you who don't know about it, Google Voice is a great free service that allows students and teachers to connect via text message and voice calls. There are a variety of options for how you set up a Google Voice account and myriad ways to use it. This post is based on my experience. Your mileage may vary. And there are a lot of other great ways teachers are using it too. I opted to select a new number for my GV account. I only connected it to my cell phone and not my home phone. If you are thinking of trying GV here are a few more things I really like about it.
25 Education Blogs Perfect For Parents (And Just About Anyone Else) School reform, college, and getting involved as a parent are all important topics for parents to stay on top of, and these blogs all offer great ways to do so. We’ve discovered 25 of the best education blogs for proactive parents, and we encourage you to check them out. PTO Today : On the PTO Today blog, you’ll find out how parent leaders are making schools great, with ideas, news, opinions, and tips for the PTO world. The Answer Sheet : From the Washington Post , The Answer Sheet offers a school survival guide for parents. With blogger Valerie Strauss, you’ll learn how to get through your child’s formal education and stay sane at the same time. Beyond School : In this blog from Education Week , parents can explore learning outside of the traditional school day. Through the Parents Education Network, you’ll learn about how parents can educate, collaborate, and empower for kids in school.
The Mobile Native. 50 Education Twitter Hashtags Perfect For Parents. Parents in the Loop Via the Class Blog. When my kids were in school the proverbial answer to “What did you learn today?” Was, wait for it… “nothing”. Do any of you get that response from your kids? I suspect so as it seems to be some kind of natural law. As parents, we were never quite sure what our kids were learning. Mitigate this and keep parents ‘in the loop’. I recently visited with a Kindergarten teacher, Amy, who started a class blog this past school year. Ofelia, a parent of a Kindergarten child, stays in the loop via class blog Ofelia appreciates that the blog “makes learning visible”. Amy, a Kindergarten teacher, talks about starting and using a class blog Amy chose to create her blog on the District private site to protect her students’ privacy.
Lori, a parent of a Kindergarten child, talks about the impact of a class blog Lori enjoys sitting with her daughter, looking at the pictures, and talking about what she does throughout her day at school. I think the power of blogging is remarkable. An audience. Smconstantino: Gr8 FE! MT “@MrsRomansCl... Joe_Mazza: Enjoying our kindergarten'... ‘The Friendly School’ | Full Frame - Education Week. Darien Zelaya, 2, clings to his mother Delkin Carcamo while she speaks with ESL parent liaison Ida White outside their trailer in Foley, Ala.
Ms. White works closely with the Spanish-speaking families who live in the southern half of the 28,000-student Baldwin County school system, where Foley is located. —Nicole Frugé/Education Week Seven-year-old Ruby Pacheco plays outside her trailer home in Foley, Ala. Ruby is a 2nd grader at Foley Elementary School, where she tested out of the English-as-a-second-language program. Alexander Gonzalez, 8, left, talks to his brother Jairo, 11, about a homework assignment in the bedroom they share in their home in Foley, Ala. Juan Pablo Pacheco, 12, cooks dinner with his mom Marietelma Ixmatlahua inside their trailer home after school in Foley, Ala. Lucy Cunningham, right, an ESL paraeducator at Foley Elementary, helps kindergartner Lizabeth Guerra try on pants to replace the oversized pair she wore to school while volunteer Dora Gutierrez looks on.
The Effective Educator:Using Social Media to Reach Your Community. December 2010/January 2011 | Volume 68 | Number 4 The Effective Educator Pages 87-88 William M. Ferriter To the dismay of television producers who count on viewers spending free time on the couch passively consuming content, citizens of most developed nations are spending more free time connecting with one another through social media. Consider that 61 percent of adults who regularly go online—and 73 percent of online teens—interact with one another on social networking websites (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Madden, 2010).
People spend 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes per day on the site (Facebook, 2010; Hepburn, 2010a). 50 million messages daily (or 600 messages per second) are posted on Twitter, a microblogging site with 145 million users (Alexa, 2010; Compete, 2010; Hepburn, 2010b; Weil, 2010). Mirroring these trends, educators are now increasingly taking advantage of social media services and tools. Proceed with Caution. Share Your Ideas On How You Have Involved Parents In Classroom Lessons. I was looking through the California Department of Education website to see their parent engagement resources, and found that they had “Parent Handbooks” for each class content area. Each one is full of ideas about how parents can help their children learn more in those specific content areas (Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, Math).
It got me thinking — wouldn’t it be nice if there were “Teacher Handbooks For Parent Engagement” for those same content areas that listed ideas on how teachers could involve parents in classroom lessons? I shared a few ideas in my parent engagement book, and have mentioned some in my parent engagement blog, but not in any kind of systematic way. So, I’ve got two requests: 1. If you know of any guides that share those kinds of ideas, please let me know. 2. Untitled. -- Blogmeister. KnappElementary: All technologies ready to... The Case for eFACE. By Joe Mazza Just as teachers differentiate for a variety of learning styles in the classroom, schools must also differentiate communication efforts for true home-school partnerships.
We must keep in mind that, like our students, today’s parents are also evolving in the tools they use each day as Moms and Dads. Technology, and social media specifically, has arrived. Social Media Statistics Per Twitter, 3.7 million Super Bowl related tweets were sent on Superbowl Sunday. Identifying Roadblocks The number of schools truly harnessing social media to connect families is relatively low, but growing. Questions to ponder • What policies and beliefs stand in the way of schools truly harnessing this power? • What factors influence the level of “access” for your school and your families? • Shouldn’t schools be the ones to set the digital responsibility bar for students, parents and other educators to follow? Adding the “e” to FACE Moving forward The research is clear. . ©2012 Joe Mazza. Knapp's Family Engagement Wiki - home. Knapp Elementary. eFace Today. Family Engagement Enhanced By 21st Century Budget-Friendly Technologies.
Initially, I narrowed my dissertation focus to bilingual education, technology integration and family engagement in hopes of choosing something very valuable to my work as a principal and to the field of education. One of the best parts of my job is interacting with families and helping them achieve and maintain a high level of engagement with their child’s teachers and the school activities in general.
Our school has a Family Engagement Wiki ( in which the teaching staff and our Home and School Association share information out to the 531 contacts on our google distribution list. Last April, hosted our first ever webcasted Home & School Meeting in hopes of engaging more families who couldn’t leave their home for one reason or another to make the meeting. We used CoverItLive.com and uStream.com to broadcast this meeting. Other means of technology we are using to engage our families include Youtube.com and Twitter.com.
Blanchard, J. (1997).