Connecting With Parents

   Keeping families informed of all the important events and information at school is a perpetual issue. There is so much information being sent home with students through email, backpacks, websites, and now even texting. Then, multiply that by the number of children in the family and the number of schools they attend. It is overwhelming for families and teachers.

    This coming year I am going to centralize my family communication through the use of the app TalkingPoints and a classroom Google Site. My goal is to reach all of my families in a streamlined process and create a place for families to find the information they need easily.

    In the past, on newsletter day I would pull out my trusty piece of paper that let me know which families I could email, who needed paper, and who wanted a text. This was just my classroom newsletter. That doesn't account for all the school and community fliers that also go home. On top of that, I also have the hurdle of having many non-English speaking families with a variety of different languages I wish I could have everything translated into. You see, working in a Title 1 school with a large population of New to the Country families creates many communication hurdles. Keeping families involved and informed is critical to every students' success and so I continue to look for ways to remove those hurdles for myself and my families.

    

    The closure of schools introduced me to the app TalkingPoints. This app allows me to communicate with my families through texts. Nearly all of my students' families have cell phones that can receive texts and access the internet. This is important because I always have several families that do not have email, so I cannot rely on that as my main communication. TalkingPoints will automatically translate messages into the receiver's home language. 

When I add contacts to the app it lets me choose a primary language. Using this feature I was able to communicate with families that I hadn't been able to reach during the regular school year. It was very exciting.

  

                     

    Using a Google Site as a central location for all communication will streamline the process for me. It will allow me to quickly organize all classroom, school, district newsletters and forms in one place. My hope is to train families to go to the website when they are looking for information instead of asking for another copy to be sent home.

    No doubt there will need to be many adjustments to my plan but I have great hope these two online tools will help me to stay in better communication with the families of my students.