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24th Jan, 2012
Communicating With Parents
How Can We Improve It?
Dear Parents,
We are finding it increasingly difficult to communicate RELIABLY with you for a variety of reasons. We do need to get information to you – sometimes quickly. How can we do it?
SMS: Till September last year it was quite effective. Then the government clamped down on SMS services with a law to impose a very stiff penalty on the cell-phone operator in case of complaints from users. So the phone companies have tightened their procedures. Though, as a school, we are exempt from being blocked, the net result is that only about 60% of our SMSs get through. We don’t know which 60%. So SMS is no longer a reliable means of communication.
Printed Notices: Many children do not show the notices at home. While we give the notices to all children, a significant number of parents do not see the notice. Or it is lost in the general clutter at home. We tried to make foolproof arrangements in the communication book – plastic pocket, index page – without too much success. You too have to impress on your child the importance of handling notices carefully. You need to check the communication book every day. You need to sign at the required places. You need to emphasize and practice that discipline.
Website: We have a “Notice Board” on our website on which we are putting up all notices. We informed you through a number of printed notices and also made announcements on Sports Days. However, we can see that the number of ‘Hits’ varies from 70 to 350 – very small figures. We have about 1,800 parents (Fathers + Mothers). It seems that about 1,500 parents have not read the notices on our website!! Discouraging.
Twitter: @vidyavalley is our twitter identity. We can tweet important information. Or we can Tweet telling you of important notices on the website. BUT we have just 120 followers. Where are the rest of you? One one hand is a group of parents who have configured their Twitter accounts to receive the Tweet on their cell phone, like an SMS (Airtel, Vodafone, Tata Docomo users). On the other hand there is a large group whom we need to get moving.
Calendar on the Web: Using a Google Application we have our School Calendar on our website. Some parents have linked it to their computer desktop and some even receive automatic SMS on their cell phone. There are many others who are still unaware (after two years) the school calendar is on our home page.
We try everything because we want to reach out to all of you. We want to make it easy and reliable. The printed communication is just too much work – writing, printing and distribution. Soon it will fade away.
In the future the notice on our website will be the primary notice. Maybe, the ONLY one. We will expect every parent to access the website EVERY EVENING and check for messages. We will use the web more and more.
- Some senior classes are already submitting documents to their teacher via ‘Google Docs’.
- Many teachers expect students to use the internet for reference work and research projects for day to day study.
- Next academic year we plan to have math practice homework from Std 3 upwards via a website of “Heymath”.
- We are also doing a pilot study to see whether we can effectively use YouTube.
In essence, all of you have to become regular users of the internet. Pull up your socks. Ensure that you have a reliable, fast internet connection at home. Push Us – we will be happy to try and run faster. But don’t hold us back – that is not acceptable.
As a start – begin by visiting our website and follow us on Twitter.
Nalini Sengupta
Twitter: @vidyavalley Website: www.vidyavalley.com “Notice Board”
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