PART A: Description of Need or Opportunity

Last year I worked in an urban school district in Jacksonville, Florida. I found that the school and teacher link to parents was very different from the Michigan suburban school districts I was used to working in. The parents often worked nights leaving students at home to make dinner for themselves and get through their homework on their own. Often times there is not a computer in the home, and if there is, the parent has minimal technology skills. Our school provided “SIS,” Student Information System, a school wide interactive communication system online for parents to get information about their students. There were many positive attributes about this system such as individual parent login accounts, attendance and grade information, and lesson plans uploaded as attachments for parents to view. Despite these features, the system was difficult to learn, navigate, and keep up with. In order to send a classroom message, I had to send it as an email to all parents. If a parent did not login to the system, they would not receive the message. If I wanted my announcement to be displayed on the front page, it would be displayed to the entire school, instead of just my classroom parents. Also, the system did not have a built in spell-check for writing announcements and messages. The most difficult part of the website was navigating and the parents needing to log in. My vision is for the school and teacher communication in my classroom to be more accessible and easy to navigate for my parents. I do not want to have an individual login for each parent, and I want my announcements and classroom activities to be displayed for my classroom only.

I propose to use a blog to answer these communication issues. I believe a blog would be best because it does not require an individual login for users to view. I could put a privacy layer on the blog to ensure that only my classroom parents would view our classroom information in order to secure the privacy of the students. I see many benefits of using a blog to communicate with parents. The blog is compatible with many different venues of communication including text, photo, video, and podcasting. I have a vision of displaying photos of student work, recorded oral presentations, podcast projects, and easy daily communication with parents about the daily and upcoming events going on in the classroom. Blogs also have the option for users to comment on posts. The parents (users) would use their own email addresses to access the blog, which is much easier to remember rather than a login provided by the school. I would also provide a tip sheet to parents about blogging and teach them how to subscribe to the updates of my blog in an RSS feed. I see the blog serving as a daily journal to communicate with parents about what is going on in the classroom.

I believe communication between the school/teacher and home is important to student achievement because it starts the academic conversation at home. If parents can read a quick paragraph about what is going on in the classroom each day, it can spark those “What did you learn at school today” conversations with students to extend their learning. When a student explains to someone else about something they have learned it can deepen that knowledge further. Also, I have seen a strong connection in student achievement and parent involvement. From firsthand observation, the students who had parents contacting me, asking questions, participating in school events, and following through on school policies, procedures, and homework had higher grades and respectful behavior. Those students who did not have parent involvement in their schooling, had lower grades, missing assignments, and careless attitudes. I believe the easier it is for parents to know what is going on in the classroom, the more they will participate and encourage their own students. The Harvard Family Research Project investigates the impact of parent involvement on student achievement:

“The results of the meta-analysis indicate that parental involvement is associated with higher student achievement outcomes. These findings emerged consistently whether the outcome measures were grades, standardized test scores, or a variety of other measures, including teacher ratings. This trend holds not only for parental involvement overall but for most components of parental involvement that were examined in the meta-analysis. Moreover, the pattern holds not only for the overall student population but for minority students as well. For the overall population of students, on average, the achievement scores of children with highly involved parents was higher than children with less involved parents. This academic advantage for those parents who were highly involved in their education averaged about .5– .6 of a standard deviation for overall educational outcomes, grades, and academic achievement. In other words, the academic achievement score distribution or range of scores for children whose parents were highly involved in their education was substantially higher than that of their counterparts whose parents were less involved.” (December 2005)

http://www.hfrp.org/publications-resources/browse-our-publications/parental-involvement-and-student-achievement-a-meta-analysis

I will implement this project by creating a sample classroom blog with sample posts that would be relevant to my recent teaching assignment as a 5^th grade reading and language arts teacher. I will add my family and friends as users for testing of my privacy layer and RSS feed as well as constructive feedback. As for future use, I am in search of a teaching job and hope to use my blog in my next classroom. My project will prove successful if it is easy to access, easy to navigate, and a functional tool for relaying important and daily news about my classroom to parents to start an educational conversation at home. When put in practice in a live classroom, a truly successful implementation would get MORE parents involved in their student’s education, and therefore help MORE students succeed in my classroom with confidence.