 Hello everyone and welcome to this presentation about digital parent engagement, supporting student learning. My name is Lorna Costantini and I'm one of the co-hosts for Classroom to Zero Live and the Parents as Partners webcast series at EdTechTalk. Over the next 20 minutes I'm going to show you snapshots from both these shows about how people for all over the world use technology to enhance what they do in the classroom to connect parents and schools and students around student learning. It was a challenge to condense the vast pool of knowledge and I'll talk about where you can get full access to the audio, video and resources mentioned in the presentation. There's extensive research that shows students whose parents support their learning do better in school. Students stay in school longer, are less likely to be tardy or absent, use drugs or alcohol, and they achieve higher grades. Despite that knowledge, parents and schools struggle to meet on the same page. At some point all of us have been critical of how a parent raises their child or how a teacher manages the classroom. Parents and schools need to be on the same page to effectively support students and support their learning. Schools want parent support but when they think of parent involvement they usually think of parents in terms of volunteering at school and attending meetings. Dr. Debbie Pusher from the University of Saskatchewan joined us on parents as partners to talk about what she saw as the difference between parent involvement and parent engagement. Let's listen to just the audio track as an excerpt of the recording. You won't be able to see the slides. What we're going to do is show where that word comes from and what I think it means. So for me, when we look up what that word involvement means when we go to the Latin sort of base for that word, it means to roll into. And so when we're involving parents in the school, that's exactly what I think we're doing. We're rolling them into the agenda that's already set by the school. We're co-opting them to do the kinds of things that we as educators want them to do. So we say we need parents to help on a field trip. Will you come and help us? We need parents to cook hot dogs on Friday. Will you do it for us? We need parents to laminate or photocopy or mix paint or fundraise. Those are the kinds of things that the school decides they need help with. It's their agenda and they're the ones making the decisions. When you go to the next slide, I've given you a few examples there. Those are things, I think, the common things that are from the examples of parent involvement. Working as an aide, an organizer, a fundraiser, or being a spectator and audience member at an event of your children. Those are the kinds of things that I think are very typical when we look at what parents do in school. Next slide I've given an example. If we looked at the continuous improvement planning or school planning that many schools in our country are involved in, if a school was working to improve student achievement, which they all are, and they were going to involve parents in that, they may do things like hold a reading day, invite parents to come and read with their kids or community members to come and read with their kids in order to promote literacy. That's involvement for me. The school sets the agenda. They decide how they want parents to be involved and parents to do the things that they're asked to do. In the next slide then, I differentiate between involvement and engagement. When we look at where that word engagement comes from, N meaning make, engage, mean pledge, when we're engaging parents, we're making a pledge to one another. So for me, that's a moral commitment. We're entering into a relationship. Think about what it means to be engaged, to be married. That equal sense of partnership with love and respect and caring moving in both directions, with give and take, with benefit on both sides. So when we are engaged with parents, we're in a relationship that matters about something really important and that's the children in our lives. Different than the hierarchy of parents doing what schools want them to do in order to serve the school's agenda. In the next slide, I've given some examples. So again, if we were looking at what might it look like if we were talking about engagement, we're talking about parents and teachers together, parents and staff together, creating the agenda, making the decisions and taking actions. So everyone's involved in the decision making, not just that one party, the educators and everybody benefits from the engagement as well. I think one of the key things with engagement is that everyone leaves that interaction strength and the children, the educators and staff and the parents and families. So what does parent engagement look like in practice and how can students and parents work together? Some schools like Twineham School in Dorset, England or Dade County School Board in Florida have used the concept of a parent portal to engage parents. In the next clip, Mike Heridy, who's assistant headmaster at Twineham School, describes how their school is using SharePoint and Education to give parents access to student grades online or the results of their student mentoring program, as well as the options online feature. Let's listen to Mike as he describes what they do in their school to connect with parents around student learning. So instead of students and their parents receiving a booklet telling them about the course, what they get is an online site which is secured by login for parents and students. They can log into the site, look at different options in terms of their pathways, they also look into individual subjects. Hi there, I'm here to introduce the options process now that you are halfway through your year 9 in school and it's now the time to think about what you might be doing in years 10 and 11. I think it was a lot better because I've got an older brother that came to the school and he said choosing options were like so much more difficult because you're just told yeah it's good, yeah it's fun, no it's hard, whatever. But with that online you get a lot more like feedback because if you recognise someone in the video you can go up to them and talk to them about it and my brother had none of that and he says you got it easy. Who is your character? Why are they in the situation they're in? What is their background? What has their life been like? My mum like was looking at it and she was like yeah I think you are better off doing drama and that's kind of like what finalised my decision when my mum saw everything on the gateway. The gateway that we've got in school has been revolutionary really in helping me and my tutor team to be able to support our young people in school. What this does is it takes away all of that paperwork, all of that time-consuming activity so that I can then identify where a student may need support, where we may need to celebrate that success and it's much much easier, much more instant and it means that that child gets whatever they need far more quickly and the parents feel more supported in the process. Well with the new gateway the parents are a lot more involved in your grades and looking back and forth over what you need to do instead of before you get one report or one parents evening a year. Now they can look at it when if they want. If I'm doing well I'll share with them, if I'm not I may be making a joke about it. In science I was about to target last year. Yeah and you dropped back. Oh yeah but I can't have other subjects. Okay, that's good. As opposed to having to go to a parents' evening once a term, the child can sit down and go through it with me and show me how he's getting on and where he's got to work, particularly at the moment coming up to A-levels, you know the topic of subjects that he's got to focus on and just sort of talk through different ways that he can, you know, apply himself really. You know we were out last night at a gig and he was showing me his grades on his iPhone. What we actually found is that their increased usage of the gateway led to them getting the highest GCSE results in their area of all the school. So it does seem that using the revision gateways as a revision tool has had a big impact already. Why didn't you just put a vector into Google? When we started this off with our learning gateways and started putting resources on there, the incredibly high take-up rate from the students, their feedback was tremendous in terms of they really enjoyed the resources being there and they could log on in school or at home and get exactly what they wanted when they wanted it. Another leader in engaging parents using technology is Aviva Dunsinger, a grade one teacher at Ancaster Meadow Public School in Hamilton, Ontario. In Aviva's presentation on Parents with Partners, she describes her journey over the past two years and introducing Web 2-0 tools to connect with parents. What is particularly exciting is her use of Twitter to take the place of the agenda book. Parents are kept up to date on the happenings with the tweets that students have worked together to prepare. Let's listen to Aviva describe how she uses voice thread and the response by a parent. This is another example again of a group blog and it's actually when we used a voice thread on the group blog for a self-assessment. So we had done this voice thread and then this was actually last year one of my parents wrote to say and she was just so happy that she was able to actually see what was happening in the classroom and also hear the language that was happening in the classroom so that she could reinforce it at home too. And I think that that's important as well. Not only is this a nice chance to receive some really positive feedback about what's happening in the classroom or for students to receive some positive feedback about what they're doing, but it's also a really great way to show the parents what's happening in our classroom too. It basically gives a window to that classroom and that's important because that classroom, I mean it belongs to all of us. If those students are going to be successful, they need to have the support of both us and their entire family. The parents, they need to be hearing that again and again and I find that really important especially like I really only taught young primary students before, but with primary students it's really important to know that these skills that are being taught in the classroom for maybe eight hours a day are being reinforced at home too. For them to really make those gains, they need it both ways. And it helps if the same language that's being used in the classroom is being used at home as well. And that was basically what this mother had really kind of hit on is that she was now able to use the vocabulary that we were using in the classroom at home with her daughter. And she was finding that her daughter was also giving her a little bit more afterwards when she was using the same vocabulary. And it's a really important skill because this was a self-assessment. And for all the primary teachers out there and even the junior and intermediate teachers, it's hard for students to assess through a work to see what they've done well on it but to also give some good next steps. And this was a great way to hopefully reinforce these skills because as time went on in the year, we did a lot more of these self-assessments and they got a lot better at it. And I think the support that they got at home made a difference too. Focusing on parent engagement doesn't mean schools need to eliminate parents as volunteers. Karen from VolunteerSpot has developed a free software application that takes out the pain of organizing volunteers. Karen describes VolunteerSpot in this recorded from classroom 20 live. I can tell you how many teachers I spoke to that said, I used to have parent readers in the classroom but it got to be too much of a hassle inviting them and keeping track of them. Or I used to have parents help with table time but I couldn't rely on them because they weren't here and so I stopped. And these were veteran teachers who wanted these parents to help but it was too much of a hassle not having them help but coordinating the help. Same thing goes for parent teacher sign-ups. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch now to my screen view. Oh, there's my lovely image that finally came up. I'm going to switch now to a screen view and show you how VolunteerSpot changes the process. Okay, so you guys, let's see if you can see my screen. I'll let it hang up. Okay, so here's my screen. This is my Gmail inbox. And here is an invitation from a kindergarten teacher that says, please sign up to help. So now I am a parent. So I'd open up the email invitation and it says, hey, here's a message from your VolunteerSpot organizer, or yours will actually say, here's a message from your VolunteerSpot organizer, teacher Sandy. And it will say, welcome to our class. We're asking every parent to come and help twice a semester. Please click here and see how you can help. And then what you would do is click the sign up button. That's going to take a moment to load. You confirm that your email is who you are. We cookie parents based on email address so they never have to register. And then the parent can come in. They know their schedule, say I'm available on Friday. I can click and see what my class needs. They need me to bring some things. I separate everything in VolunteerSpot by what you might bring or what you might do. Using digital tools and specifically social networking applications can be a challenge because for the most part, parents locked the skills and knowledge to fully support the use of social media in schools. There are some success stories though. The Toronto District School Board in Toronto, Ontario is fully embracing these tools to connect with parents in the community at large. The director Chris Spence has a blog and the school board has a Twitter account, Facebook page and a YouTube channel. Stuart Oakley, TJ Gertz, Manny DeLuz and Aveline Rusticcia share how they are using social media, as well as the development of an acceptable use policy for using social media in the classroom, followed by a clip of Chris Spence, the director of education on YouTube. Be where people are. And this is what social media is about. I'm going to be joining in on the conversation. A lot of analogies I've heard is like being at a cocktail party and you're able to hear all the conversations that are going on and you can participate and so forth. So it really is a great way of being able to share information. Absolutely is a new way of doing business. Social media is growing by leaps and bounds, as I'm sure you all are aware. In Canada here recently there was some research done and for the first time there were actually more people online and doing online activities than watching television for the first time in history. Building on that, in the GTA alone, we've got about 94% of the population that are using the internet and are online, particularly in immigrant communities. It's a way for them to keep in touch with their home country and so forth. So definitely it's where people are and we need it to be there. It's great opportunity, as you know, for unfiltered listening, sharing information, et cetera. So that's where we started, was using the Twitter. We started using blogs as well for the director and we're using YouTube because we do video stories and we're able to post those onto a TDSB page on YouTube. And the final piece that we just launched back in March of this year was Facebook. So we're looking now at a real integrated approach to using our social media and using our website as a communications hub and launching platform. Essentially, what we have is a code of online conduct that covers employee and student use of organizational computers, et cetera. We have drafted a social media staff guidelines document that's now making its way through the system for various approvals and consideration because this is a new phenomenon and because of the nature of social media, you know, it has some ramifications. But essentially what it talks about is using common sense and represent yourself using these channels as you would if you were out in public or so forth that you're representing the organization and that you do so appropriately. Good day. The celebration of Earth Day is in part a recognition of the state of our planet and a day that highlights our individual responsibility in shaping a collective future. The last item I will highlight is the digital parent project. It was started by a group of teachers and parents who gathered together to create a library of resources that would provide schools and parents with some useful websites and programs that they could use to teach parents about Web 2.0 tools. You will find a link here to Kevin Honeycat's video podcast series for parents about raising digital kids. We have a table of contents here that will direct you to things like digital media, internet safety, Facebook for parents and a special workshop here led by the People for Education about creating an e-newsletter, links to digital media awareness, internet safety, all great tools for you to use to help parents understand the impact of Web 2.0 tools. Justin Reeve is responsible for the initiation of this project and you'll be pleased to find his graduate work on Facing Facebook. There's a complete list of information and research materials available for you but even key to that is impetus with the group for the Facebook module on this project and if you take a look at a link from the module tab for Facing Facebook a presentation you'll be able to take that directly to your school, set up an LCD projector and use it to teach parents about Facebook. As I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation full access to the complete recordings of the audio from parents' partners, videos and so on from classroom 2.0 live has been posted in a course in the e-learning center, the digital parent engagement course so if you come to e-learning center and click on the digital parent engagement you may be prompted to enter your access just simply sign in with guest and you'll find the course that has again the research material behind this I'm just going to scroll down Debbie Pushers presentation with slides and particular topics that reference what we talked about today and a very good one How does Web 2.0 affect you and your students with some information from the digital nation project and I think you're going to find it a terrific resource to help parents understand and yourselves the implication of Web 2.0 tools