- Newletter emails
- School / Principal / Class blogs
- Twitter and Facebook
- Wikis
- Parentella Private Parent-Teacher Social Network
Teachers and school produce so much information for parents. And if it not given a place online, it is lovingly scrunched into the ‘backpack express’ (new term I learned via @BrianStPierre)
In addition, I believe there are at least two more benefits for creating online communities for parents and teacher to communicate: increased learning and reduction of waste.
Increased Learning
Do you know how much time is wasted handing out newsletters and letters to students? Teachers of elementary aged students will empathise with the following story:
I taught Year 3 a couple of years ago and I had to ‘stop teaching’ 20 minutes before the end of school day to hand out all the parent communication notes. You see, some went to all students, some to the oldest, some to the youngest. Then I had to go outside and make sure all the children put the notes into their bags.
20 minutes a day, 5 days a week for 40 weeks of the year is 4000 minutes or approximately 66 hours. That is time away from teaching and learning.
Reduces Waste
By putting information online, we are reducing paper waste. We already have too much paper in our classrooms. Some schools ask parents to donate a ream of paper at the beginning of the year to reduce the costs. To me that seems like backwards thinking. Why aren’t schools thinking of ways to cut the paper usage?
Shelly Blake-Plock from Teach Paperless writes a blog “Social Tech Integrated Paperless Classrooms.” And on that blog there is a Paperless EarthDay Pledge where he is asking classrooms to go paperless for Earth Day 2010. As I write this post, 975 teachers have joined the pledge.
