Communication with Parents

I know that students go home and when asked what happened in school that day they reply “nothing.” The same response is produced when asked, “What’s going on tomorrow?” and “What did you learn in class today?” Teenagers are so tuned into their personal lives that parents have a hard time finding out how school is going and what is happening in their child’s classes. I value parental contact and communication and unfortunately I cannot call each parent on a regular basis. For this reason I have used weekly emails.

The idea is simply. I take thirty minutes a week to write out and send my lesson plans to my student’s parents. The email is often just a basic outline of what is happening in class each day of the week. For instance Monday – Quiz on Evolution, Tuesday Notes on Bacteria and homework is to read through the lab for Wednesday, Wednesday – Bacterial Pre-Lab Quiz, complete Lab, and Lab due by end of Thursday, etc. I also start with a general paragraph about what I am noticing about class and tips for parents to help their student succeed.

I personally value this communication as I find that parents are more likely to contact me if there is an issue because all they need to do is hit “reply”. I know parents find this tool important as they tell me they finally have a way to start a conversation with their child that will not be the “nothing” answer they are so used to.

After reading Web 2.0: New tools, new schools by Solomon and Schrum (2007), I sit here wondering if there is a better tool to communicate my classroom schedule. I feel the weekly email has some definite drawbacks. First, my lesson plans throughout the week for various reasons, which means I spend more time writing corrections so parents know what is going on. The alternative is to write very vague plans, but this makes my emails less helpful to parents. Second, if parents don’t help their student remember when assignments and assessments are due. In other words if there is a test on Friday parents forget to remind their student to study because the email was read on Monday.

Please don’t get me wrong. Students are responsible for their own education, but the reality is that students forget and having a parent help remind them is not a bad thing. So here I am thinking about a better solution to parent communication.

I have two ideas that I am tossing around. First, I wonder if Twitter is the solution. Twitter (http://twitter.com) is a social networking website that would allow parents to “follow” me. I could send out tweets with relevant information such as “Study tonight for tomorrow’s Biology quiz!” and “Homework due tomorrow.” I think for me twittering would be much less time consuming because I wouldn’t need to send out updates to a changed lesson plan. The downside is that I don’t think this form of communication would reach many parents. Parents would be required to sign up for an account and then they would have to go on to the twitter website to get the information.

The other idea I had was to have a class Google Calendar (http://www.google.com/calendar/). I like that a Google Calendar can be synced with Microsoft Outlook, iCal (Apple), and Sunbird (Mozilla). This would allow parents to view the information as soon as I update the calendar. I could update, modify, and change information as often as needed by simply updating the information on my calendar. Parents who did not sync the Google calendar would also be able to view the calendar online.

I am curious as to how you all communicate with parents! Do any of you use twitter or Google Calendar?


Solomon, G. & Schrum, L. (2007). Web 2.0: New tools, new schools. Washington DC: International Society for Technology Education.