Search Journal #2

Search Journal #2

I-Search 2.0

In my continued search for ways that I can bring social media into the classroom, I wanted to focus more on how to involve parents using social media. There are quite a few options available now than there were when I was in school. First off, the internet was brand new and almost no one used it. Now, it's everywhere.

So many parents have busy lives and technology has supported them in staying connected while on the go. One more way that parents can stay connected is to what is happening in their child's classroom. In order to explore how to keep parent's involved in social media, I expanded my search to Edutopia. I simply decided to search 'social media' to see where it would take me. 

One of the first resources I found was the guide on "How to Create Social Media Guidelines for Your School." Knowing that social media can be a tricky frontier to navigate, I decided that this would be a good place to start. Integrating social media into a school comes with the great responsibility of doing it correctly. So much can go wrong, it is important to have guidelines in place to protect students, parents, and ourselves as educators.

I also found a blog "Bringing Parents and Guardians into Your PBL Projects" that discusses just one of the ways to involve parents in their child's classroom. Sites such as Edmodo and Twitter can make it easier to make parents a part of the classroom environment, even if they are not able to be in the classroom physically. I also found the blog "Helping Parents Embrace Social Media to Stay Connected in the Classroom." 

From these new resources, I'm finding that social media can be used to share and communicate via documents (GoogleDocs), showcasing student work using Instagram, keeping a running commentary of classroom events via Twitter or Edmodo, or even creating a class website where parents can keep tabs on what is happening and what resources are available for them to use.