New tools

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This year has been my hardest year so far.  I have a difficult group of students and am having an exceptionally difficult time adjusting to a new administrator and a new leadership role.  For the first time in my career I am starting to doubt that I will be able to do this forever.  I feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and unsuccessful.  Right now I am searching for anything or anyone that can help me find the energy and the passion that I seemed to have had just a few weeks ago.  Hopefully seeing my fellow fellows at Professional Advancement Institute III will bring me some comfort and some clarity to help me get through this school year.  Hopefully.

For this blog I am tasked with discussing a tool from my fellowship that I am implementing already.  One goal that came out of my experience at Professional Advancement Institute I was to make better use of technology in communicating with students and parents.  To do this, I have started uploading my weekly plan to the school website the Friday before the beginning of the week, I have added online math assignments to TenMarks (a math practice site) on the Friday before, and I have started using the Remind texting app to send reminders to parents.  Using these tools has allowed my communication with parents to be more transparent.

My teaching partner and I invited all of our parents in for small group information sessions during the first few weeks of school.  In these sessions we helped parents sign up for our email list and Remind texts.  We also went over all of our expectations and procedures. In years past there has seemed to be quite a large gap between the home experience and school experience of students.  By having these meetings, using technology appropriately, and planning in advance the gap has gotten quite a bit smaller.  Already this year I have received feedback from several parents stating that they are impressed and surprised at the level of clear and routine communication between school and home.By uploading the plans early and then reminding parents via text and email to access those plans, families are able to preview the week and start on homework on the weekend.  This has allowed parents to better support their students and 6th graders to feel less stressed during their adjustment to middle school.  Success!

My next goal in this area is to find better ways to involve non-english speaking parents more effectively.  I have the weekly email translated and posted in spanish and send out a weekly spanish reminder to check the updates already, but I don’t know how often those families make use of these tools and I also have families that don’t speak Spanish or English.  Something to think about.