Communicating and Collabortating with Classroom 2.0

Our group assignment for week 4 was a Parent Newsletter explaining to parents the term "Classroom 2.0" and what it meant to teach and learn in the 21st century. Creating newsletters such as this are an excellent way to communicate with parents. Communication between teachers and students is important because it allows parents to understand the kinds of activities, grades, and behaviors that their child is participating in while at school. It helps parents have a clear understanding of what their child is expected to accomplish throughout the school year, and may give them an idea of some areas their child could use further help in at home. For teachers, this communication with parents is beneficial because it allows them to learn more about their students and who they are outside of the classroom. This will help them educate students more effectively.

I will communicate with my parents on a regular basis in many ways. First, I will have a website which will discuss upcoming events, due dates for assignments, and will include educational games and tutorials that will help students better understand lessons taught in class. I will also keep an online grade book such as Engrade that will allow parents to check their child's grades and attendance on a regular basis. Students will also be sent home with a Friday folder outlining weekly assignments and quizzes to notify parents of their child's progress. This will be helpful to those parents who have less access to the internet. Finally, I will be readily available by e-mail at all times.
My group, The Lit Tech Sextet, decided to use Glogster to create our newsletter. We had never used the program before, yet we had heard many great things about it and thought we would take on the challenge. We decided to share information for the newsletter via g-mail and then paste our work onto the newsletter together during our group meeting. The only downfall for using this program for a group project was that it did not allow us to collaborate on it all together as we did using Google Docs. Allowing this kind of collaboration would be an excellent addition to this program.

Next time I do a newsletter, I will personalize it for my own classroom. I may try other programs to see what works best for me in order to communicate information to parents and students. The overall goal with this project for me was to create a newsletter that would be parent-friendly and was easy enough for parents to understand who had little or no experience with technology. I think our group did a great job of accomplishing this goal!