Communication between parents and teachers is essential for student success. When I become an educator I hope to establish partnerships with parents to allow the door for communication to ALWAYS be open. Parents need to know and feel that teachers are approachable. Often it is difficult for parents to frequent parent teacher conferences, open house, board meetings, and activities or programs taking place within their child's school. Parent's busy schedules often don't allow flexibility to accommodate such activities. Luckily parents and teachers can communicate in a variety of ways. In my opinion one of the very best ways to effectively communicate is via email. It is a fast and efficient way to ask questions, get answers, share information, and maintain a relationship/partnership. I know that I will use email as the main form of communication with parents. I believe podcast would be fun to use to share information with parents. I could create one podcast for ALL parents. For this weeks assignment we created a newsletter. I think it would be interesting to turn it into a podcast. For the newsletter I used Microsoft Publisher. I had difficulty choosing which template to use for the layout. I also had to figure out how to make the print/text larger without changing the font.. So, now I know how to use the zoom option. Two years ago I took a course at the Mount, Nature of Schools. I had to write a letter to parents explaining how I was going to incorporate multicultural influence into the curriculum. I used the letter for this assignment. I wish I had know about Microsoft publisher then. I'm not sure that I would do anything differently if I were to compose another newsletter.
Click here to view newsletter.
2 comments:
Hi Barbi! I agree that parents and teachers should have open communication always! Although I am not a parent, from a teachers perspective I feel it is an essential part of being a great teacher. I understand that parents have other obligations that they need to attend to and may not make it to Open House for example, so that is why I believe in an open door policy for teachers and parents. When I am a parent, I hope my child's teachers will offer me the same courtesy.
I do agree with you about the open communication between both parties. In the past, I felt teachers left too much responsibility on the student to keep their parents informed of what is going on. Of course, not all students do tell their parents. The newsletters and engrade.com help parents become constantly updated with their child's progress and class instead of risking having them find out when it might be too late.
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