WordPress Sidebar Calendars

Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 9:12 am

wordpress sidebar calendars

How teachers can increase parental involvement

The connection between parental involvement and student achievement is obvious. The question is how teachers go about increasing the participation of parents?

There are many different ways teachers can do this, but I think invovlement best way to increase parents is through their "blog teachers' own (okay, almost all of my students have Internet access).

Without But I think all teachers these days should have some sort of website or blog.

Being a teacher "blog" allows teachers to a very easy to contact parents on a weekly basis.

In my blog I think a simple classroom each week informing parents (and students) of what we are doing that week and what the job is every day. Also inform them of important events and deadlines (such as the History Fair, FCAT testing, etc.). Even include useful links to the school calendar, the district's website, the philosophy of the tasks, the curriculum map, etc.

What I did not really so difficult. But you should know that my way is the cost a little money (around U.S. $ 6.95) per month.

First, let me tell you about a couple free-form. First, check with your school .... you may need some software and creating web you can host your site, although the school's servers. However, the program of this school is so bad that not even bother ... is really a joke. The other thing you can do is create a blog with blogger.com or wordpress.com. Both are free, but is limited in several respects.

Personally, I like having my "own" website where I have complete control and my own name domain. To do this you must buy a domain name and host your website. Fortunately, if you do this it does not cost much.

Just be sure to sign up for a hosting account with a reputation that has Cpanel. This allows you to automatically install WordPress blog script ... that's what I use. This can have sounded complicated, but not really ... is very easy and any good hosting company will have a large support staff.

Once you have your blog up you want your parents (and students) to subscribe to automatic notifications. Thus, each time you update the blog your parents will automatically an email with the blog embedded in the email.

Think about this from the perspective of parents ... how great would be to get a weekly email letting you know what your child is going to work that week and what the job is every day of the week.

This site may use a and feedburner.com. Simply follow the instructions on that site that show how to publicize their "food". You basically copy small amount HTML code for your page and paste it into the sidebar of your own site (through its control panel). Again, this may sound complicated but is actually easy ... to have things all set in less than 20 minutes.

Think how impressed your parents, students and administration will be, but more importantly, think about how much they will help improve academic achievement of their students.

About the Author

A teacher blog is the best way to increase parent invovlement. See exactly how I set up my own teacher blog here: http://teaching-tips-machine.com/blog/?p=79

WordPress Sidebar Basics