Using game play & development to educate
Evaluating My GAME Plan Progress
Walden University – Course 6713: Week 5 Application, Part I
My NETS-T goals were to (1) effectively correspond with parents through the use of current technologies, and (2) provide additional avenues to teach “legal and ethical use of” technology and online content. In reflecting upon my progress, I feel my actions have helped me to meet these goals.
- I sought out and collected parent emails from the front office files;
- I set up a blog with a categories feature that allows postings to be searched by general course information, assignments, tests, projects and announcements to readily provide information to my parents and students; and
- I created a “Quick MLA Reference Card” for my students and myself, and have implemented more assignments requiring research with a works cited page.
I have learned that my parents love the added communication resource. The blog news postings allows them to stay informed of course happenings and be actively involved with their child’s academic life. I have also learned that having a quick MLA style guide for myself to check student work against has made me more confident in assigning projects with research. In addition, I have observed my students readily utilizing their reference cards during their assignments.
Although my parents like the blog as a new information resource, the parents have had to voluntarily sign up to receive posting updates. I have been working with the email settings, but I have yet to find a way to automatically subscribe parents, whom I have manually added as users of the blog, to receive emails when updates are posted. If I am unable to set this up, I may look into creating a blog on my Moodle system and transferring the data there, or researching other possible communication tools that might fit my purposes better.
Shanna,
I think that the idea of having a class blog for parents to constantly be able to refer to about class current events is a great idea! So great that I will be using the idea for myself 🙂 Did you have to manually add each parents’ e-mail for them to be able to post on your blog? Have other teachers in your building followed your idea as well?
Shanna,
Sounds like a great idea, to have mass communication with your parents! Do all parents actually want to receive automatic emails on updates? There may be some who do not, who prefer to check by going to the blog. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to make the signup voluntary, as long as those who really want the update info can receive it.
Katherine,
Yes, I manually added all of the email address. Next year I may try and see how successful sending home a letter, and mentioning the blog address when I make my parent contact calls, at the beginning of the semester goes. However, just like this blog, anyone can post to it. I have a filter to try and catch spam and so far it seems to be working. I have one 8th grade science teacher who likes to send weekly emails to her parents about what will be happening for the week in her class. I think she likes the idea of the blog as she also uses her class website to post study guides, etc.
Laurie,
There are very few parents who would rather not receive these auto emails and just check the site themselves. What’s nice about the auto sign up, is that they know that the blog is up and going and therefore can choose to select “unsubscribe” from the blog auto emails at any time.
Thank you both for your thoughts and feedback!
Shanna