Sunday, November 8, 2009

Parent Involvement

Denise Evanko asked a question that so many teachers, new and seasoned, ask, "How can I get parents to read my blog?" I hope you will give her some suggestions. Leave a comment!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, I do get very frustrated. So, I sunk to bribary. A pack of Smarties for a blog comment from child or parent of child. I have established a few constant customers.

Also, having a grade level, POD, or team email distribution list helps, as I can constantly stick www.faroutmath.blogspot.com in front of folks. See, I did it again. That's www.faroutmath.blogspot.com in case you missed it. The trick is that you have to work it into the "flow" of the email so that the reader does not recognize the less than subtle subliminal message.

I usually say, "We just updated www.cce5thgrade.com, and by the way you could check out www.faroutmath.blogspot.com, beacause the kids really did some cool work. Yep, subtle, like an anvil!

Peace,

T-Cubed

Debbie Harbour said...

Denise, I feel your pain! Some days I get frustrated that I do all this work to share their child's lives with them and nobody's listening.

Last week I added a survey to the bottom of my newsetter that asked simple questions about my blog.
Do you read it? Do you update automatically? Do you know how to write a comment? etc. I only received 5 surveys back. This week I put it on there again and stated since I only had 5 returned I was asking them to do it this week.

Maybe that would be a start to help you see what they know and can do. Just a thought.

Michelle Ellis & Debby Cothern said...

Denise,
The best way we have found is to show the blog to your students in class and then encourage them to go home that night and leave the class a message. The next day we bring back up the blog and read their messages to the whole class. The kids love seeing their words appear. I would also get a counter added onto your site. Debby and I have one on ours. We have had over 11,000 people view our blog since last August. Even if parents or viewers don't leave messages, we at least can see they were there.

Anonymous said...

I hear you. I struggle with the same issue. Some of our students do not have access and that is unavoidable. We also have several parents that really don't read our newsletter and thus has caused confusion in the past. I, too, would love some ideas about getting parents to read our blog on a regular basis. I mostly find nowadays that I am limiting my posts since I don't feel that the families are really using the blog as often as I would like. I have even added the weekly homework assignments and still have parents who have internet access ask me for another copy of the homework. I would really love to hear what everyone thinks and is doing in their classroom. TLC