Web 2.0 Communication: Linking Parents and Teachers
John Hendron, Goochland County Public Schools, Virginia
Dr. Frank E. Morgan, Kershaw County Schools, South Carolina
I haven't met an educator yet who doesn't value the importance of the link of communication between the school and the home. Since asking every teacher in our school district to maintain a blog since the 2005-06 school year, the amount of content, and the visits to our website, have skyrocketed. Communications—via the "blogosphere"—is taking place. Students can visit a teacher's blog to find a homework assignment, parents can learn about the week's learning objectives, and the savvy parents are subscribing to the newsfeeds and podcasts that are emerging within teacher blogs. The messages are, in fact, getting out. And today's parents are staying aware through the convenience proffered through technology
I work in a school district in central Virginia where we are trying to accommodate communications with students and parents using the so-called Read/Write Web. Just yesterday, my superintendent and I gave a presentation to sixty individuals at a regional technology conference on our efforts to foster communication digitally and some of the rationale behind those efforts. If Thomas Friedman is on your bookshelf, or you have read the more recent book entitled Wikinomics, you know that the world around us is indeed changing. Technology has enabled a new efficiency that creates connections across the world that has changed the way people do business and communicate. Technology has transferred the power to create products and advertising to the hands of the consumer to produce their own creative products. Technology has been enlisted to enable people to manage multiple inputs and outputs in our multi-tasking
Author Ian Jukes, in a report authored for the InfoSavvy Group in 2005, tells us that neuroscientists are finding that, indeed, our students today are different. The media and experiences they now have before them "wire the brain" differently. Jukes, who often quotes a more well-known paper by Marc Prensky, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," suggests solutions for reaching digitally-native children. He says learning should be fun, relevant, and instantaneous with less text, more pictures, and "more opportunities for multitasking, networking, and interactivity". Do we all agree?
It was interesting that a vendor at this conference cited this idea of digitally native students and what learners "need" for the twenty-first century. He suavely demonstrated how all of his company's products support the fast, anytime, anywhere, take it with you, media saturated student. The gadgets and computer software is cool, after all, and what I wouldn't give to be back in a classroom with all the wares he could sell me.
In our presentation, my superintendent was making the argument that parents today don't get the classroom newsletters. Their time is tight and they're spending less time with their kids. The solution - educators have to step up to the plate and use technology to reach into the home. He said despite what some folks say—that parents aren't interested—he's sees interested parents who simply cannot keep up with traditional means of communication. Parents would say, "I used to check my son's grades at 12:45 AM" or "He was asleep, but I'd find time the next day to talk to him" or "If it came to me on paper, I might never see his grade." One lady raised her hand, demanding to be heard. "Do you really think your parents know what a blog is? Do they know how to listen to a podcast?"
That's when it hit me. In my role as an instructional technology specialist for my district, I know our students—at least a fair number—are connecting to social networks, listening to songs on their MP3 players, and are savvy enough to filter the overwhelming amount of media available to us through the Internet and more traditional means. But our parents? Yes—our parents too. This is what my superintendent said: "We have a great number of parents now who grew up with technology in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike the "digital immigrant" I am with technology, they get this... they're part of a younger population in their 20s and 30s who get blogging, are subscribing to podcasting, and they tell me 'I heard about what was going on at the high school because I saw it on your blog.' A twenty-something reporter in the community called me up to tell me about a story he was getting ready to publish about a project that was going on in a marketing class at our high school. He read about it on that teacher's blog..."
Someone else at the presentation asked how many students we currently have blogging. I told him, "Last year, it was 16% of our student population. This year, it's roughly the same." The natural question followed: "Why not focus on student blogging—if you can support and do it—instead of teacher blogging?"
Our younger, digitally-native teachers have no problem blogging. But a greater number are in fact "digital immigrants" who need comfort in the tools and methods used to teach students. Blogging has been a great way to show them the potential of the Read/Write Web. The blogging students we have come from classes where excellent teachers (and not necessarily the most excellent digital citizens) felt comfortable enough with self-publication on the Web to introduce the practice for their students. We all recognize that changing teaching practices takes time, patience and professional development. I was proud to communicate with our colleagues that instructionally-sound use of the Read/Write Web would come naturally from teachers who felt comfortable enough with this new tool. It reinforced for me my long-held conviction that effective integration of technology will happen in classrooms where teachers have ample access for students, technical support, professional development, and most importantly, personal experience.
Turning our teachers into bloggers was the first step in an opportunity to change learning with technology. As a communications device, it has set new expectations within our community. We believe it's preparing students for a quickly changing world the skills to communicate and collaboration using technology will be a key skill. I know the role of teacher as blogger and podcaster is moving us in the right direction. Creating that bridge between "our world" (that of the teacher) and "their world" (that of students) is important, Ian Jukes warns. Maybe some of those gadgets need to be in the hands of teachers, first or at least simultaneously.
After visiting a third-grade classroom where the class had put-together a digital-storytelling project that ended with the presentation of their movie, one student raised his hand, and asked his teacher, "Hey, can you put this movie up on your blog so my mom can see it?"
We made sure she did.
John Hendron is the Supervisor of Instructional Technology at Goochland County Public Schools in Virginia.
Dr. Frank E. Morgan is now the Superintendent of Kershaw County Schools in South Carolina.
You can see examples of their blogging and podcasting through their website, www.glnd.k12.va.us.
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