Teacher Communications

I am interested in the happenings at my child's school. This is particularly true of the classroom activities. We get paper updates about once a week and grade level updates about once a month. I want better, more modern communications.

The school has a website, but it really doesn't communicate much current, dynamic information. The likely method of communication is multi colored tree killer piles of paper on Thursdays. Twitter has Follow Fridays and the school has Tree Trunk Thursday. Interestingly, in this era of tightening school budgets, we still have not made better progress with free communications.

Here's my suggestion. Each teacher should have a page on the website and a school approved twitter account. The webpage should be simple enough to let parents know what the teacher thinks is important. It could be a combination of pictures, assignment & activity dates and class highlights. You can omit pictures of the students for security, but the basics of what the teacher would want the students' families to know would go up on the page as soon as the teacher chooses. This eliminates the long lag for any good things that happen the day after the weekly push of printed material. One way for teachers to do this without cost would be to use a blog. In the case of educators, they might try Edublogs. Another option would be to get the students involved and start a wiki. You can expand your page to include multi media, but for now it is sufficient to recognize it as a great way to communicate with the extended school family.

Once the teachers have a method of putting their information into a webpage or blog, the next step is sharing that information with the parents. Twitter is an easy way to do it. When the teacher updates the webpage/blog, they send a tweet. This would alert all the followers to check the page. The followers should be the student families. It could also include peer teachers and interested administrators. Here is an example of a school district twitter feed.

There are several upsides. There is less paper purchased and used. This is another step to save the planet and teach the kids about options that are environmentally friendly. The school website becomes more useful once it includes the active teacher pages. There should be an increase in traffic which may allow them to better monetize the website. This increased traffic could also make it easier to recruit business partner advertising.

The burden on those that want to keep up with student information is small. It can be done via computer (at home, work or a free one in the library) or your mobile phone by receiving text messages. If you want to print the information, you can.

Twitter is now on the menu

Earlier this year, there was a Why I Don't Twitter post.

All of those facts are still valid for me. However, I have discovered that there is an entire business opportunity that aligns well with social media.

Without sending a single tweet, you can find all sorts of information, including coupons, special deals, customer service, and professional tools.

For me, Twitter is not about the question, What are you doing, but it is about the question What do you know that might be useful to me.

As you will see in the near future, it also allows me to blog more often. Twitter helps with one of my basic business rules. You have to meet people where they are. The younger, more technologically adept customer is hanging out in social networks.

Twitter is definitely a part of my evolving Technology Action Plan (TAP)

How are you TAPped in?

Going back to the 1970s, families relied far less for technology than we do now. The big expense was the standard home phone with separate charges for local and long distance communications. Most families had no access to daily pay TV, mobile communications (phones & text messaging), internet access, or data transmission (fax, e-mail, VOIP, etc.)

Today, we all spend money on technology, but how does the expense fit into your planned use of technology? Even at the basic level of a home phone, people no longer lease the physical phone from the local phone company. You purchase your phone from somewhere. That phone may be wired or cordless; it could have an answering machine or not; it may use features like caller ID; it may have speed dialing features.

This weekend we officially shifted farther away from free TV. Digital television requires a converter box and antenna to get “free” channels. This change brought me to think about my technology action plan (TAP). While many may not think about their TAP, each person has one no matter how passive it might be.

Just in case you know someone that still needs help with the Digital TV conversion, you can find local assistance through this link.

Think about the technology that you actively use. What purpose does it serve for you? Have you compared it to the alternatives? Is it cost effective? How do these answers change for people in a larger family unit?

We will TAP in much more in the near future.