Opening our classrooms, part two
I began a series of overlays to Blogger Alison Anderson’s ten great ideas for opening our classrooms to parents without making it a time-consuming teacher task. As I have allowed the ideas to steep, I find more overlays, extensions and implications of the easy, tech-leveraged sharing that can emanate from our classrooms to involve parents. So here is Part Two:
6. Open sharing for parent involvement and learning reinforcement immediately begs the question: will your school allow Bring You Own Device (BYOD) sharing? If the kids have their phones and we can have them send the tweets or images to share with parents, why not? Perhaps some carefully conducted experiments in pro-active sharing can support your efforts to promote a BYOD initiative. Kids share, Parents ask. Parents understand. Kids learn and remember. Repeat. [Yes, I know there are all sorts of monitoring and management issues, but if we survived open classrooms in the 1970s and 80s, we can figure this out. Other schools have done it, so we can learn from their policies and mistakes!]
7. The ultimate open sharing would be a live webcam. Would you, as a teacher, you want a live webcam in your classroom? Legalities aside, this raises interesting issues, to say the least. Even if you password protect the webcam so only logged in parents can see it, how does a parent understand when tuning in for a few moments here or there? What about snippets viewed out of context? You could have a pretty good class discussion about individual rights and constitutionality by asking your middle or high school students what they would think of sharing via webcam. It might be interesting to hang a dummy camera for one day during your Constitution unit!
8. Teaching about context and purpose. As media consumers, we are all subject to manipulation. What a great way to flip this around by asking students their purpose in sharing a particular item from class. Did they offer enough context so others can understand it? Did they imply that it was something different by removing it from context? How can “innocent” social media sharing manipulate a message? If you ask any middle schooler how to push his/her parent’s buttons by selecting one thing to share from today’s class, I guarantee he/she will know which thing is certain to fire up mom or dad.
9. What did you learn from YOUR kid’s school today? It is important to show our kids that parents are learners just as we should show teachers are learners. This is where some positive spin from businesses or local media could help by asking/posting the question: What did you learn from YOUR kid’s school today? Wouldn’t that be a great app on Facebook, sponsored by Walmart or Staples? Simply sharing the message that we can learn from our kids is a powerful way to validate learning across our society and support schools with more than money. I think a lot about ways we could bring businesses and others into more effective, grassroots partnerships with education, and this one seems easy.
10. Employers who value education should value their employees’ involvement as parents. If you allow employees to spend five minutes of their break checking out what is happening at their child’s school, you are saying that school matters and that parenthood matters. Celebrate the sharing. It will pay off with more involved parents, higher achieving kids, and better future employees.
There’s a lot more to social media than selling products. We can involve parents and sell learning.
