Free and easy ways to connect with your staff & parents!
by Amber Teamann • • 0 Comments
There are a variety of ways that teachers and administrators can communicate with their class, staff, and parents. Effective communication is vital to a schools success. Not just the typical teacher to parents way, but also from the campus to the families. Good communication can prevent misperceptions and mismatched expectations, encourage parent involvement and foster a team approach to caring for your students. Families should feel welcomed, informed and as involved as possible.
Tim Lauer in Portland uses Instagram to share the good things happening at his school. Want to know what matters to that lead learner? Check out his feed.
Classroom activities, fun projects, assemblies…there are visuals to accompany all of the good things going on at Lewis Elementary.
Melinda Miller creates videos that communicate important calendar events happening. Her campus still sends home a paper calendar but also provides this link to her staff/families. She uses an app called Touchcast, to make this happen. TouchCast creates an interactive presentation that mixes video with web content. The app lets you record a video and overlay elements such as web pages, maps, photos, Twitter streams, polls, quizzes and more. Users watching the video can click on these multimedia elements and interact with them while the video continues to play. You start by recording a video using your iPad’s camera. You can pick from several themes like newscast or review that’ll insert titles and other elements to get you started. TouchCast uses a timeline to lay out the elements of your video and allows you to drag& drop extra content. Tony Sinanis, known for his Bammy award winning and New York Principal of the Year ways, creates amazing videos with his students each grading period. Want to know what Cantiague students are learning about? Let them tell you. I think my favorite part of this idea is the relationships that are so evident between Mr. Sinanis and his students. As an administraor, it is impressive, but as a parent? I’m all in.
We use Remind101 not just with our students in individual classrooms, but also with our staff. This has been a HUGE tool for me this year, as I don’t have the personal relationships with our staff that I am used to, just being a year in on this campus. It’s always awkward when you get to the phone Free and easy ways to connect with your staff & parents! | Connected Principals: