5 Tech Tools to Boost Teacher-to-Parent Communication

As a teacher, it is crucial to maintain a positive relationship with your students' parents throughout the school year. By keeping them in the loop, it will not only make their lives easier by knowing how their child is doing, but it will also make your job easier out of the classroom. Parents will know how thier child is succeeding in school, and will make an effort to get them extra help or find ways to help with homework, studying, and more. 

It can be hard to find successful ways to communicate with parents, but technology offers easy access for both the teacher and the parent. Here are five tech tools that will help boost teacher-to-parent communication. 

1. Classroom Webpage: Keeping a class website gives teachers the opportunity to post classroom happenings, such as field trips, projects, assignments, updates on units and subjects, school issues, and more. Creating a class website is easy, and there are plenty of resources teachers can use to do so, like Weebly. Each day, parents can go on the class website for updates, post comments, ask questions, and more.
2. Collaborize Classroom: With this free website, teachers can streamline conversations with parents and students. The site can also give teachers the opportunity to post polls, hold a debate, post practice tests, bring resources and videos for certain subjects, and more. Parents can look on their child's class site and see what they are discussing, and even participate in the discussions as well. With Collaborize Classroom, teachers can also post students' grades and attendance for parent use.
3. Remind: With Remind, teachers can send text messages to parents and students about assignments, quizzes, homework, field trips and more. Teachers can remind parents about when a progress report needs to be signed, when report cards are coming home, answer or ask questions, and communicate effectively with students and parents.  
4. TeacherKit: With this free app, teachers are able to organize their classes, keep data on overall behavior, attendance, grades, make notes, and share all of this information with parents via email.
5. Class Blog: Just like a website, keeping a class blog is an innovative and creative way to keep parents in the loop with what's going on in the classroom. Keep parents updated by sharing class goals, assignments, and news. Another good part of a blog is that students can also participate, sharing their favorite assignments, projects, and subjects for parents to read and see. Most blogs are free and easy to set up. Look at Edublogs or Wordpress for an easy set up. 

Article by Kassondra Granata, EducationWorld Contributor