There is no "I" in "Team": Collaboration with Parents

I believe that my job is to further the development of each of my students. In order to do this I need support from parents and their collaboration. There is no "I" against them, as if parents were ancillary to the teaching process during a school-year.  I will use every resource I can to serve my students and one important resource are the students' parents.  I see them as as both resources and team-mates.  I value their understanding of their children and the power of their role as parents.  I will treat them with respect and dignity and seek to understand who they are as much as I will try to understand their children.  I will forge a relationship of respect and trust by communicating with them whenever I feel that doing so is in the best interest of their child. This means constant and continuous communication.  This will communicate to parents that I respect their ideas and opinions and value their input into their child's educational experience in my classroom.  This may make parents feel comfortable participating in their student's educational experience and also make them realize (if they haven't already) that they have much support to offer their children.

I plan to communicate with parents via the most convenient methods for each parent.  Some parents may prefer phone-calls, others emails, a classroom website, an electronic newsletter or a written note home. Prior to the school-year starting I will offer many different options for communication and ask each parent to tell me what their preference is.  I will include both Web 2.0 technologies in this list as well as more traditional mediums.  

It would be fun to try using a software program like Glogster.com, which is very interactive and has multi-media capability, or a class website (via webs.com) to communicate with parents. During our group project this week we chose to use Glogster.com to make a newsletter for parents. We chose this program because it has multi-media capability.  The product ended up being quite impressive and engaging.  However, this ended up not being the most effective program in regards to collaborating with four other people to create our newsletter. This is the case because Glogster does not allow real-time collaboration. Only one person can edit the newletter (or "glog") at a time.  If one group member didn't volunteer to take the lead on the design of the newsletter than we would not have been able to easily create it remotely and would have needed to meet at a physical location. 

If the group were to create a newsletter again I would do some more research to find a more conducive tool for producing a multi-media product that group members can collaborate on creating in real-time.