“Using a Classroom Webpage to Communicate with Parents”
Article Reviewed by Grant Hilsabeck
Summary
Teachers are expected to keep consistent communication between themselves and parents and can be a complicated task. By having a class web page, teachers will have an easier time communicating with parents and students. In this article, Sydney Brown examines a class web page created at Mary Scroggs Elementary and the sort of feedback and benefits they have achieved by constructing this technique of parent/student involvement. In the web page, the teachers have daily summaries of the schools events, links to different resources, pictures of students, and contact information for parents among other great ideas. Parents did respond immediately and the results were positive. With the classroom website, a parent or caretaker can build on the information conveyed in the daily summary and ask more specific questions. If a parent is on the road during a business trip, they always have access to this site. Even friends and extended family members have access to this webpage. Students use the class webpage to connect to the classroom from home. A student who is at home sick can log on to the site to see what happened in class while he was absent. Another student may insist that her family log on to the site when she gets home from school so that she can read the daily message to her family. Overall, this is a very effective method for bringing parents, students, and teachers closer which benefits everyone.
Analysis
Before constructing your classroom homepage, a teacher must recognize the many opportunities they have to be a more effective educator. One of the opportunities is to improve communication between parents and teachers. This is a good article that shows you evidence of how effective having a class web page is and the actual responses of parents of the students. Teaching is a very demanding profession. Teachers have to find ways to meet all of the goals expected of them and that takes a lot of work. Once you take the time of creating a webpage, updates can be made in only five minutes everyday. This is helping teachers be more efficient and effective on meeting the goals of parent/teacher communication. If parents have feedback or questions to ask, they can do so with the click of a button. If the parents are busy and hard to contact, it is much easier for them to visit the website and feeling involved in their children’s education. The earlier an educator starts developing a web page, the better it will become. Using feedback from parents and suggestions by faculty, the teacher can continually improve the quality of their site. The students will be excited to see their pictures over the internet and want to show their family. The student hopefully will no longer fall behind if a day of class is missed. I see many benefits of this technique and I am already developing my own template. I encourage other young educators to do the same.
Resource:
Brown, Sydney. “Using a Classroom Webpage to Communicate with Parents”. (Online) Available: (May 2003).