I have been marking through my GCSE Science classes’ coursework today and am actually writing this short blog post as a break! (Ha ha I hear cries of get a life! Don’t worry I am used to people saying that, remember I dress up as a giant yellow chicken.) Every time I marked a piece I then texted the students parents and gave them feedback on their son or daughters coursework. I basically told them the current grade that they had and what they needed to do to improve, I then also texted the parents of the students who had not handed in their coursework. Last year I remember spending hours of my half term phoning round trying to speak to them, just now I simply texted them which saved me hours!
Now before you start worrying that I have all the mobile numbers of the parents of the students in our school and that it may be a little strange to be texting parents let me explain. We have been trialling a text service provider called teachers2parents: http://www.teachers2parents.co.uk/ and so far it has been fantastic on many different levels. I have been using as I discussed above but also to remind parents of deadlines; have sent praise texts straight after a lesson about particular students who had done something brilliantly in the lesson; we even had a break in at the school and the text service helped communicate to parents quickly who then came forward with important information.
This has great potential and has been extremely powerful in a very short time. I am not sure if we will purchase this yet as we need to evaluate it fully in the next month or two but my own experience and the experience of the students I teach has been extremely positive. Do you use a text service? How do you communicate to parents?
To answer your initial question, sites like “my school closures” that text parents on school closures are valuable to schools.
Texting isn’t bad, the only risk is liability of content because it is “recorded” unlike an average phone conversation.
With all that in mind, I’d be super happy if I was a parent and you were texting me feedback, good on you! 🙂
Great job
We too use teachers to parents and have found the service great. So far we have only used it to notify parents of events, but think the way you are using it is a brilliant idea.
We’ve been using teachers2parents for a year or so now and it is really successful – one thing to be aware of however is that there should be some sort of control/limitations/awareness of how many texts a parent gets sent, and not to overdo it. We’ve had issues where a couple of subject teachers text regarding an individual student’s , a head of year texts all the year group and the school admin texts the whole students – and therefore a parent gets four texts one afternoon and there are some that might get irritated by “text overload” Also when texting the whole school or or the whole year it’s important to check it IS relevant to all students. That said – it is great for sending praise quickly and when we were shut for snow it was an excellent communication method.
Agree with John – great potential for good but could trip up a tired teacher who posts something unfortunate. Schools will need to discuss protocols at length to ensure it is used well but certainly looks really worthwhile
I also agree with John and Bill.
I work for part of the largest global education supplier. We are helping schools in raising attainment by harnessing technology to deliver 21st century learning for the whole school community.
One of the main benefits of our solution is online access for parents to view information on their child’s work and progress.
The school can contact parents through the inbuilt email facility or, by using an optional partner product, send text or voice alerts to parents’ mobile or landline phones.
Many schools using this type of technology have reported a saving in their telephone costs and have seen a saving in the administration time, thereby freeing up valuable school support staff time.