Newsletter for Parents

About...of all things...blogging! Imagine that.

Communication is extremely important between parents and teachers, even if parents aren't sure of how involved they want to be in their child's education. You would hope that they'd want to be extremely involved, while allowing their child to take some responsibility, however, the most important thing that teachers can do is provide access to information. We are all human beings; students can misunderstand what the teacher has said or expects from students. Certainly, teachers can think they're being clear and students can think that they're understanding, yet the appropriate message is not getting across. Having another party (i.e. parents) in the mix to either ask questions or know information can be helpful at time. Additionally, it gives students a greater sense of importance regarding their education, to know that their parents are involved in communication with their teachers.

I plan to communicate with parents at the beginning of the year through a newsletter similar to this, probably utilizing the old standby - paper! Once I establish communication with parents, I will find out who/how many have access to the Internet and exactly what kind of group I'm working with this year. It may be that they're all working parents who have access to their emails and the Internet on a daily basis, so that we can incorporate technology appropriately into our communication. However, if I'm in a lower socioeconomic district where their Internet/email access is limited, I wouldn't want to exclude anyone from information so I might chose communication in print as well as through technology (such as a wiki.)

Next time, I'd like to try Glogster, or even creating podcasts or imovies/videos with the students to share with parents! It would depend on what we have access to in our schools.

We used Letterpop for this parent newsletter because Jen had already used it before, said it was fairly easy to use and then started (easily) a new letterpop newsletter. However, we all could not edit at the same time, and even had trouble working with it when someone else was not editing it! While everyone contributed, because of time constraints, I had to begin again from scratch and was surprised to find it to be limited compared to what I would have liked to have done! I would rather have had the videos embedded, instead of a link to them, for example. I also didn't feel like I had so much control over formatting and other stylized graphics. However, it's always been wonderful to collaborate with my group! Next time, if I had more time, I would try to figure out Glogster for this type of project (I had started doing that, but it was taking a long time to figure certain things out) so that I could embed videos and check out what their graphics situation is.

All in all, I was very happy with our newsletter!