Educators! Why not keep parents in the loop?
Whilst browsing around earlier on, I found Stump’s fantastic blog. Whilst it may look fairly unassuming, I’m pretty sure he’s hit up on a brilliant ideas that all of educational users think is a really interesting idea… why not use ipadio to provide a more consistent dialogue with parents?
Back when I was in school, which wasn’t that long ago as I’m still quite young, my parents only knew how I was getting on by annual parents evenings, when they’d get a ten minute audience with all of my teachers… I was too well behaved to get letters home explaining in, er, more detail what I’d been up to, as some of my colleagues did. Similarly, if my parents asked me what I’d studied at school that day, they were probably lucky to get a monosyllabic grunt as after all, I was a teenager for a large portion of my school career.
What I’ve found on Stump’s blog I think could be really interesting – what he seems to be doing is using ipadio to report on what has been studied that day in the classroom – almost like a diary. For example, in his latest broadcast, he’s describing how the students learned about the legacy of Rome. This could enable parents to engage further with their child’s learning, and extend the learning experience from outside school hours – if parents know what topics are being studied, they could encourage their kids to read relevant books, read around the subject and so on… not to mention adding their own knowledge and experience if they happen to know about something relevant.
What’s brilliant is that it’s very easy to do for everyone involved – at the end of the lesson, or the end of the day, the teacher just has to make a single one minute phone-call talking about what was taught during the day, and parents will be able to follow what their child is learning in a number of different ways depending on what works best for them – they can follow them on the teacher’s blog, download them as a podcast and find out what their kids have been up to on the way to work, even follow the teacher on Twitter and listen whenever a phonecast is tweeted!
This strikes me as a really good idea… but I’m not an educator. Do we have any teachers reading who might like to post a comment about what they think?
Posted in General Blog Posts on March 16th, 2010
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As an ex-teacher I think that the idea has potential, but in a slightly different way. There may be one or two keen, middle-class parent who would want to follow what there children are doing, or who might want to catch up on what has been missed. However, I suspect there numbers can be counted on one hand.
However, I can see phlogs being used in three ways:
1) Recorded broadcasts of live lessons to enable absent students who wanted to to catch up – particularly important for older students studying for exams. Sadly, this would probably be illegal and never happen.
2) Teachers are often asked to set work for students who are off long-term sick. A phlog would be brilliant here as you could say and explain so much more than having to send in a hastily typed email.
3) Phlogs could be used as a follow up to a particular lesson, with further explanations and examples and tasks for homework. Easily created supplementary material.
Just some ideas.
This is a great idea.
It would be useful for the learners to reflect upon their day too – perhaps as an assessed reflective exercise?
David
I think it is a great idea too. As a parent of younger children it would be great to have an update of what the kids were being taught in class – “today, we explored numbers up to 10 using marbles, read stories about dragons and learnt a new song ‘la la la dooo’” or some such notification. This would allow for some structured follow up and reinforcement at home. .. .. guess that means I’m middle class then
Well, it certainly sounds like an interesting concept. We are strong advocates of increasing the interactivity between Parents, Teachers and children alike. It would be a good idea in concept to get information, but how would you go about in participating? I think this would be more crucial to helping to form a better relationship between the classroom participants and the outside world.