Parent Email List Options

In keeping with the theme of the beginning of a new semester and communications, I want to spend some time talking about different ways of using email to keep in touch with parents.

A parent email list is an excellent way to communicate with parents and keep them up to date with what is happening in your class.  A weekly email can inform parents of homework assignments, projects, and upcoming test and quiz days.  Keeping parents up to date with this information is one of the best and easiest ways to open lines of communication to parents and the information can be used by parents to make sure their child is completing all of his/her work.

There are two methods that I can think of to create an email list.  The first is creating a list within your email program.  If you want to create an email list but don’t know how, contact me and we can set up a time to create one.  The advantages of using this method are the ability to send messages to your list as easily as you send any other email and once parents are added to your email list they are in your contacts so you can easily send messages to individual parents as well.

The second method is to create a newsletter for your class.  The website www.mailchimp.com is a free newsletter website.  Setting up a Mail Chimp newsletter is more time consuming on the front end but it gives you the ability to create a much more polished looking product to send to parents.  The newsletter can include pictures, a school banner, a calendar, and multiple sections that can showcase different information.  For those of you who are creative, you can find different content that you could add to a newsletter, in contrast to the mundane information I would normally include (as seen on the example below).  It also gives you the ability to create a template that you can use each week.  Because the template is saved you just need to update the information within the template so you can save the time of crafting a brand new email each week.  You can also use Mail Chimp to send emails to individual parents but the process for doing so is not as easy as it is when you are using your email program.  Below is an example of the newsletter that I sent to parents on the Friday before winter break.  I has all of the information for what we will do the week after break, what students can be doing during break, and some information about the upcoming final for my class.

Parent Update for the week of 1/6/14 Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

Math II News and Updates

Review Activities In order to help students prepare for the final exam, I created a series of review activities.  These activities require students to look back at their notes and push themselves to use the information in their notes to answer the questions.  Many of the questions in these activities are not as simple as a typical homework problem or test question, they are designed not only to make students search for old information but understand it so they can answer questions that are different from what they are used to seeing.  Over the holiday break students have two activities they can work on.  These activities are not due until the Wednesday after students return from break; however, I strongly encourage you to urge your child to work on these over break.   North Carolina Common Exams Students will take the Math II common exam on either Thursday  1/16 or Friday 1/17.  We will have only two days to review for this test in class.  All students should have notes for all of the lessons we have done up to this point.  This is the time when these notes will really work to a student's advantage.  Now is an excellent time to start reviewing.  If students reviewed 1 unit a night to a point where they felt comfortable with that material or knew what questions they needed to ask in class, by the day of the test they could review each unit 3 times. Weekly Activities   Monday 1/6 Start Area a Volume Unit (5 days) Turn in Unit 7 Test Corrections   Wednesday 1/8 Units 2 & 3 Review Activity Due Unit 1 Review Activity Due   Thursday 1/9 Hand out final review activity (Due Monday) Friday 1/10 Last Day of new material

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Remind 101

Every teacher needs to find ways to contact parents and students outside of class.  We of course need to keep parents up to date on grades but if we can find an easy way to update parents and students on upcoming class activities, projects, etc. it would be even better.

Remind 101 is an excellent resource for interacting with students and parents outside of class.  It is a service that uses texting (you send the texts via your computer) to send messages to the phones of every parent and student in your class.  The best part about this is that, even though many of our students and their parents may not have internet access, almost all of them have at least one cell phone in the house.  Remind 101 gives you a method for contacting everyone in your class with pertinent information about the class.  It also is completely confidential no of your recipients get your phone number or the other numbers you are sending the message to.

Here are some examples of how it can be used:

• Remind everyone of a test on Friday, and since it is sent to parents, add an encouragement for parents to make sure their children study.
• Remind students and parents that a big project is due on Monday.  Send the reminder right after dinner so that forgetful student will be reminded.
• Update a homework assignment "for being such a great class today you only have to finish through problem 8 for tomorrow".
• Remind everyone on the Thursday of Spring Break about the project the need to have finished when they return on Monday.

Setting up remind 101 is a very easy process which I will demonstrate in the video below.  You sign up for an account, then you have students and parents text an access code to a phone number (You can create separate classes with different access codes for each of your classes).  After that you just start texting your students and parents.

Ways to get students and Parents to sign up:

• Have students sign up the first day of class
• Put the remind 101 number in your 
• When you first call parents have them sign up
• Email the # and password to your parents
• Encourage students and parents to sign up by emailing tips like "Make sure you look at example 4 before the quiz tomorrow" or "tomorrow seems like a good day for a quiz"

For those of you wondering why I didn't talk about websites this week, I decided to change the content of the blog in preparation for the beginning of 2nd semester.  I wanted to add content that could be used by teachers immediately when they start their classes in January

Websites for Classes

Over the next two weeks I am going to be addressing how you can use websites in your classes.  I am not going to be talking about the type of material you put on your school website, rather using websites for different functions in the classroom.  I currently have 4 websites that I am using at school.  The first is this one to share ideas with our faculty.  The second and third are both used for different purposes in my classroom, and the third was created for a conference I presented at in the fall so I could disseminate content to everyone who attended.  I will put links to all of the websites below so you can check them out, and before Christmas break I will spend some time showcasing each one.

http://probabilityscavengerhunt.weebly.com/ this was used for a QR Code scavenger hunt that we completed in Math II during the 2nd week of school

http://geoconstruction.weebly.com/ this website is basically a location where I have placed links to videos for my students to watch.  We have used this on two occasions in my class for students to work through an activity at their own pace.  Each lesson contains 4-6 videos and students watch each short video before completing a task to go along with it.

http://studentsengineeringlabs.weebly.com/ This is a great way to get information to people when you present at a conference or training.  This website has an introduction, a copy of the PowerPoint I used at the conference, a copy of the lessons I showcased at the conference, and a list of external resources.

HPC's 1st Technology Focus

The finished product for this week's tech focus can be found at http://ed.ted.com/on/HV0npHW9  Check it out and read how it was done below.

This week’s focus:

bContext – iPad screen recording app

TedEd – a website where content like multiple choice, short answer, and discussion questions can be added to a page with a video.  It can transform a video into a lesson with formative assessment

This week several math teachers had a conflict with our scheduled department meeting time. Instead of going forward with the meeting with almost half of our members missing I decided to create a virtual meeting that teachers could attend whenever they had time.  I put together a meeting agenda and turned it into a PDF (bContext is an iPad app so word documents don’t work).  Using bContext I was able to screen record the agenda PDF while I talked about each point on the agenda.  Using bContext I was also able to annotate on the PDF during the recording so I could add important information.

Once my video was finished I uploaded it to YouTube.  Then I added the video to a TedEd website and I added a couple multiple
choice questions (mainly because I wanted to test out this feature, not because I wanted to test the math faculty) and a discussion thread that everyone could post to and engage in a conversation about.  After that I was done and I sent out an invitation to the math department to join the meeting.  They could watch the video immediately but in order to reply to my questions they needed to sign up for a TedEd account.

Another nice feature of TedEd is that it keeps track of student responses to questions so you can monitor their progress and see what questions they got correct.

So there is my first technology blog.  If you are interested in seeing how this technology works, email me and we can work together to make this work in your classroom.

 Ryan Monson – HPC Technology Guru