6 ways tech simplifies school communication and engagement

Key points:

• Streamlining school communication empowers all district stakeholders
• The dos and don’ts of parent-educator communication
• Female district leaders target back-to-school priorities
• For more on school communication, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub

As technology trainers, we support teachers’ and administrators’ technology platform needs, training, and support in our district. We do in-class demos and share as much as we can with them, and we also send out a weekly newsletter. We coordinate a lot of different training sessions across our many different platforms, and support principals during staff meetings and on professional development days.  

School-to-home communications is a fairly common sticking point for elementary school districts. We’re both former teachers, and we largely relied on catching parents in the school drop-off line or sending reminders home with students when sharing vital school-to-home communications. Basically, we’d catch parents and have quick conversations with them anytime we had the chance.

Knowing just how ineffective this communication approach was, our district decided to implement ClassDojo, a communication and behavior management platform that connects teachers, parents, and students. We’d both used the platform before and saw it as a good way to build parent engagement and improve two-way communications between school and home.

We’re using the platform across the district and in all 13 schools now, with some sites using the platform to handle different tasks with varying degrees of cadence. Here are six benefits we’ve seen from taking our largely analog, labor-intensive communication approach into the digital realm:

1. No more pinning notes to the students’ shirts. Our new platform solved a lot of our communication problems and the issue of flyers getting lost in the backpacks. As teachers, we’ve used the platform to post stories, celebrate student successes, and reinforce positive behaviors by awarding students “points” throughout the school day.

2. Facilitates communication and engagement. ClassDojo became a part of our day. Once we learned about the platform, it really helped facilitate communication with parents. We signed up to be a mentor and began spreading the word about the platform at school sites. Teachers can just copy and paste their student lists into the platform and then use those lists to connect with their families. All you have to do is enter their phone number or email address and the platform sends the message. At the other end, parents get a link to join on their cell phone. It’s really simple and user-friendly.

3. Eliminates manual translation. The platform also offers translation capabilities into 130+ languages that help districts connect and engage with parents from diverse backgrounds, countries, and ethnicities. For example, our last school comprised a mix of English and Spanish speaking families, as well as some from Yemen. They loved being able to translate our messages into their first language. We were previously handling the translation ourselves, and for every communication. Parents were thrilled because this opened up an entirely new two-way communication tool for them. They really liked being able to send us a message that we could easily read and respond to as well.

4. Gives us a window into every school. From the technology trainer perspective, the platform has been a welcome addition to our district’s technology stable particularly because it has replaced more analog–and much less efficient–ways of communicating with parents and reinforcing good behaviors both on and off campus. The platform also gives us a window into what’s going on across all 13 schools. We get to see everything that’s happening at all of the other school sites, and that’s awesome. We can’t be in 13 schools at the same time, so just getting a little peek at what each school is doing has been very helpful.

5. A simple, user-friendly tool that everyone can use. We started using the platform as teachers in 2015 and today all 13 of our schools use it. An implementation that started slowly with simple message distribution has since grown into a districtwide effort to get everyone on the same page, using the same platform and standardizing the school-to-home communication process. The platform also helps as a classroom management tool by allowing teachers to reinforce positive student behaviors while at the same time sharing student struggles with parents, who are kept in the know about their children’s academic successes and challenges.

6. The opportunity to grow and scale. Earlier this year, we developed a “train the trainers” program for our communication platform with the goal of helping teachers, administrators, and staff continue to explore and leverage the technology. Our ETLs were trained so they could support each school site. Teachers also know that we’re here to answer questions and provide one-on-one support as needed.

This year, we want to increase our platform use by comparing exactly how different teachers and administrators in the district are using it. For example, many teachers enjoy sharing their class stories on it, while administrators and support personnel use it for district oversight and to share information about open houses, back-to-school nights, and holiday-related events. We’re going to dig down deeper into some of these use cases and share them across the district.