Effective communication between teachers and parents is essential to foster the progress and development of the students. Both teachers and parents play a vital role in contributing to the educational success of the student. Hence it is very important to maintain a rich and strong relation between parents and teachers. A healthy relation between schools and homes is what reflects in the behavior of the child.
In this busy world, where both the parents are working it is often a difficult task for parents to take time out of their busy schedule and meet the school management to discuss the child’s development. Every parent is worried about their wards academics, classroom activities, behavioral aspects and would be eager to get notified of the same very frequently. With the advancements in technology, the school management can infuse the same to their system and create a platform that enhances the engagement of parents to get in collaboration with the schools and teachers.
Few common practices of establishing interaction between schools and teachers include phone calls, newsletters, parent-teacher conferences etc. However, these can be stressful to teachers as they have to invest in extra working hours to fulfill the needs. With the advances in technology in the field of education, there are many ways to build interaction and here are most effective ways that enable consistent and continuous communication between parents and teachers:
- Email: The use of email communication helps the teachers to communicate about any issues, problem or announcements with the parents immediately. Rather than waiting for the slot of teacher-parent meeting, the information regarding the child’s progress or any school–based information can be intimated in a timely and consistent manner. This type of communication is to address barriers of time and schedules and have proved to increase parent-teacher interaction and this is the common practice in many schools today.
- Website: Parents would often like to get the information about classroom activities and what happened during the school. Rather than asking the children to share the information, parents can simply rely on the school websites and portals to obtain that information. With an accessibility given to parents, they can simply view the online websites to get daily updates about their children’s academics, attendance, homework and other school related activities. These online communications are more convenient for parents as they do not have to do a phone call or attend a conference interrupting their work.
- Social Networks: In this tech-savvy world, many parents would be most active on social media like Facebook or Twitter. Making social media as the communication platform, a school page or account can be created and have all the parents active on social media added to it. Any important information or school related events, special programs can be simply posted to the account enabling simultaneous information sharing.
- Live Chats: For those parents willing to communicate with teachers face-to-face but can’t do it for many reasons like time and space constraints, live chats is the most considerable option. Parents and teachers can communicate live through video conferences, skype or google hangouts and work together for the child’s progress. This works like the conventional face-to-face meeting and saves the time and resources.
- SMS Notifications: Having integrated with the SMS service, teachers can send an SMS for any events like holidays, important notices, child’s academic progress, attendance etc., and also intimate parents about special days and activities in schools.
- Messaging Apps: Schools can use the messaging apps like WhatsApp and others to send texts to students targeting a special group of the audience or all students. Maintaining a central repository of the student information, the administration can extract the contact details from the central database system and push the SMS via the messaging apps.
- Mobile Apps: This is the most feasible and convenient way of communication between parents and teachers. Parents want to hear about their child’s academic performance and expect this information to be communicated to them regularly and early. The technology-based mobile apps enable the school management to do so in an easy and convenient manner.
MyClassboard believes that when parents and teachers communicate with one another, they will be able to work towards their common goal of facilitating the best educational experience possible for students. Strongly grounded in the belief, MyClassboard has facilitated in providing the above-mentioned services. Apart from them, it has incorporated specially dedicated communication modules in its mobile app like a digital diary, assignments, time table, gradebook that are intended towards providing the information at the earliest.
