Kuunari

With the return to physical teaching delayed at least until October for me, I was inspired to explore a issue that proved very challenging in the spring with distance learning: communicating clearly and effectively with parents and students.

I found myself juggling multiple formats for communicating with families, including google hangouts, google classroom, gmail, and remind. These different formats has very different ways in which information can be posted, and it was often a challenge to make sure each format got the same message.

I started to realize that an important chunk of my job had become similar to a social media manager’s job, engage my audience and ensure that I am reaching everyone.

While 70-90% of my families in my 4th grade classroom had a working email address, I found my engagement and response from families at around 30%. In addition, while remind made it to most of my families, I would take a screenshot of any message of substance (due to Remind’s 140 character limit) which meant that my families who’s primary language was something other than English could not utilize any automatic translation tools. With over 5 home languages spoken in my classroom, I knew that simply translating a message into Spanish was not going to meet the needs of my families.

My classroom was 50% white, but it was my families of color I was most disconnected from. While the ultimate goal is to make sure that each family is able to engage with and access the distance learning we were creating, we need to remember the mantra of social media managers: meet the audience where they are at.

After talking with our Latinx liaison who informed me that most of the families she works with are on Facebook, it make me realize that facebook, twitter, and instagram are all additional avenues I should be utilizing.

But I was already overwhelmed with all the venues from before this spring’s experiment with distance learning, how am I going to add additional apps that I will need to monitor and use?

The key is to utilize tools that have already been created for social media managers.

My goal is to create a single message that then can be shared on multiple platforms quickly and easily.

While I explored a number of different tools, I have ultimately settled on simple, free tools that most teachers should feel comfortable with.

The Tools

Here are the main tools that I’ll be using. Feel free to jump ahead to the section you are interested in. Each section will explain how to use the tool.

1. Email Contacts Manager – Google Contacts
2. Newsletter publisher and CMS – Google Docs
3. Text Message – Remind
4. Learning Management Software – SeeSaw
5. Social Media Manager (Twitter, Facebook Page, and Instagram) – Hootsuite

After section 1 and 2, the rest of the my tips and tricks are going to be pretty tool agnostic. So if you are using a different LMS or communication tool, this will still work for you.

Email Contact Manager – Google Contacts

Google contacts is a surprising robust tool that I have just started exploring. I’m almost embarrassed to say that I typically either looked for a previous email to my families, or I would make a google doc with all the emails separated by a comma to copy and paste. However, google contacts is an incredibly efficient way to create shortcuts when communicating through gmail, or google chat, or when sharing documents with a large number of people.

Here are the steps.

1. Open up google contacts. You can either follow that link, or click on google contacts in the ⋮⋮⋮ in most google applications next your user name in the upper right corner.
2. Within google contacts, create a label and then add the email addresses of your families, or your students, or your teacher team, or whomever you need to create a quick short cut to email to.
3. As students join or leave your class, you will need to manage your email contacts. It can be helpful to add the student name next to the email address by using quotation marks so it’s easy to find the parent’s email address to remove them.

Google has an in depth guide to setting up labels and groups in google contacts.

Google Docs as a Newsletter publisher

Google docs does not have any newsletter specific templates, but here are two quality ones I’ve found in 30 seconds of googling “more google docs newsletter templates.” Template 1 & Template 2

Quick Tip: Make a folder for all your newsletters and set it to view with link. That way every newsletter you make in that folder will have the same share settings.

Once you set up a newsletter the way you like it with all the information you need to include, you can send it to all your families from within google.

Quick Tip: In an effort to minimize the number of locations I will need to read for messages, the newsletter will include boiler plate at the bottom informing parents that while I will respond to emails within 24 hours, I cannot guarantee a response time through any other channel. If it is important, they should email me with their question or concern.

Quick Tip: I’ll include a link to the newsletter folder in my boilerplate so that families can quickly find old newsletters if they need them.

To email your document, simply go to file -> email as attachment. This will give you a couple of options, including emailing it as the body of the email (saving your families a step).

Type in the label you created in google contacts in the to box, and it’ll auto populate whomever you are plan to email the newsletter.

Quick tip: have 5 or 6 different home languages as I do? Teach your students that they can translate any document automatically using google’s translate tool. Go to tools -> translate document and over 100 languages are available. While the translations won’t always be perfect, for our families for whom English is a second language, this can help them get the general ideas you are trying to communicate. The teacher can ever translate the document for families that might struggle with tech proficiency. It’s all about meeting the families where they are.

For all the other places I want families to see my newsletter, I will copy the link to the google doc. I’ll be sending a link through remind, on SeeSaw, and through hootsuite. It will only take a couple seconds to copy and paste, and if I end up changing or fixing something on the newsletter, everyone is linked back to the correct newsletter.