How can we further engage whanau in their children's learning?

 Success Indicator: Provide parents with opportunities to learn alongside their children and be part of the ‘shift’ in thinking about digital learning

This is a question we have been grappling with - we believe we inform parents very well at OLA  but we struggle to get a level of parent engagement that we are happy with.

Current Forms of Communication
- website
- emails
- newsletters
- texts
- facebook
- classroom blogs

This year we thought one of the benefits of the Chromebook trial (Yr 5-8) would be increased parent engagement. I started a blog Good, Great, Innovate to document our journey and keep our parents informed about the learning that is taking place. We send these posts out via facebook, twitter and email.

After the Spirals of Inquiry workshop I was encouraged to refocus on this question - and also to articulate why I thought parents were hesitant to engage and give feedback.

Hunches

1. Parents are hesitant to post comments on blogs as they are worried about what others think?
2. Parents are unsure how to post a comment (technical issues ie do they have to have a google account)
3. Parents are too busy to read the blogs?

Possible Solutions
- workshop on how to post comments, what makes a good comment
OR
- crete a resource that shows parents how to post a comment -? flipped resource - short video clip on how to...

We will continue to work on this - in the meantime I wrote a post about how we all need feedback and this did get a response. We used padlet and embedded it in the post and parents were able to post anonymously. This produced three responses. 

The Importance of Feedback

What do you think?

More to think about...

- Anne Keneally (CORE Ed) suggested that we get the children doing the blogging and parents will follow - thinking of maybe trying a student guest post each week on the Good... Great... Innovate Blog.

- Patrick has managed to get some engagement on his classroom blog by getting the students to do the blogging and by using labels... definitely going to try this.