Using twitter and cellphones to connect with parents

I am currently researching tools to use to communicate with parents. I am looking for teachers that are currently using twitter or texting to send messages to parents. How hard is it to do? How are you doing it? What reaction have your received from parents. Bill Ferriter wrote this post about it. Your thoughts please.

Tags: parents, texting, twitter

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Permalink Reply by Alan Stange on December 15, 2009 at 8:33pm

I've tried using Twitter to keep parents informed for about eight months now. I keep it up, but it has been a disappointment. Not one parent follows me on my classroom Twitter. I have twenty-two grade fours and fives. Twenty-one of them are following my classroom Twitter. Many of them comment on the links I send them. I embedded the twitter feed on my wikispace. This space is the place they come to for just about everything related to web-based learning. I keep at it because I know eventually Twitter or some similar networking tool will work.

I put my energy into Twitter because I knew how it could reach parents and students through both phones, emails and web pages. I was not aware of gadgets or widgets that would do this with texting.

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Permalink Reply by Lorna Costantini on December 15, 2009 at 8:41pm

Thanks so much for sharing Alan. I am convinced that your patience will pay off. Do your parents interact with your wikispace?

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Permalink Reply by Alan Stange on December 15, 2009 at 8:56pm

They look at it. Dig around in the space and the related student spaces and you will find the things they are interested in. Again, none of my parents are members of the wikispace or even leave comments. At interviews, a number of them expressed familiarity with the content. They are engaged with their children and I can imagine them looking over their children's shoulders as they are shown their pages. The kids snd and receive emails form their parents regularly.

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Permalink Reply by Lorna Costantini on December 15, 2009 at 9:03pm

Thanks again Alan. I will take a tour. I appreciate your input. You have given me something to think about.

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Permalink Reply by Carlos Fernandez on January 4, 2010 at 9:37pm

I have thought about using twitter to communicate with parents since the beginning of the year. Being new to twitter this year I held back. Now that I am much more comfortable with twitter I feel as if I could do it but still hesitate to do so. You see I use twitter 100% as a professional development tool. I am not sure if I want to mix parents in with my list of twitter educational friends. My good friend in the same school gave it a shot with 6th Grade parents and he said it was a complete failure. No parents signed up to do this. I am curious to see how you are doing it and how its going. School starts for me in 3 days, so still considering.