Adding a Blog to the School Site

The school site with Surrey Schools, is well organized, especially if you're a parent.  All teachers listed, there, all assignments under the parents (the choice of the teachers to use this).   Under the parent  section it's easy to find what a parent would want to see.  But how do you tell if parents are coming to your site?  You can use a google tracker or other site analysis programs online.  But the easiest thing to do is use a blog.

Updates to our school site is constant, with the office staff taking a lead role, working in conjunction with the administration at our school.  One of our girls (Juanita) updates almost every day.  The main page is where she works the most but as I said we still don't know if parents are coming to it unless we ask for an analysis from our IT people.  Two years ago we had a blog attached to our old site and when we migrated over to the new system (SurreySchools.ca) we brought our blog with us. Take a look.  Most schools now have one.

Sullivan Heights is proud to be actively engaging in 21st Century technologies when communicating with our community.  As part of our efforts, we have discontinued our bi-monthly publication of large school newsletters (with the exception of our annual August mail-out) and instead we are using technologies which include Twitter (Our Twitter Feed), a news blog (News Blog) and our home page (Home).

We encourage our communicty to follow us in any of these systems and parents have responded with a 1000 emails now listed on BCeSIS for teachers to email parents any concerns, or just comments about their children.

Below is a list of views, today, yesterday, notice last month of our school blog and the total since we started this a year ago.  Notice our traffic, which is constant all day.  Many parents have signed up for the emails to their phones to keep in contact with our school.  They enjoy the fact that they can read the quick and easy blog text sent to their phones.

Traffice is from google, with people searching for Sullivan Heights, and as you can see most of our traffic is from Canada.  This is just one of many ways we keep in contact with our parents and students.  We even use tags so parents can look up specific entries that relate to what they want (i.e. dry grad).  I recommend this manner of communication to any school.

Gathering Data on Your School Website.

It's a little difficult to gather data when an entire school has the freedom to do research on anything they want, when individual goals are used to motivate teachers to grow and expand in their field of expertise.  It's even harder to gather baseline data when one of your goals is to build communication with your parents by using the new website development program your district has put out and the address of your website has now changed.

I'm not complaining (well maybe a little) but the challenge is there, where do you start?  For our Innovative Grant we've have a number of subjects that we're working on, a range of reasearch from going paperless to using both online free websites, wikis and twitter to communicate more fully with both students and parents, from assessment to project based planning.  We'll be doing base data in each and every form for all these areas, but not the general baseline data that the district wants because it's not applicable to our area of study that we need.

So how do you get a baseline of data for communicating with your parents when your parents are not in the school constantly and you have over 1000 students in the school (that's a lot of parents)?  You do it during Parent teacher interviews and use an IPad and a Google Form to get it done.

Our baseline started simple, asking parents is they use these sites, and asking them to register for our blog that we hooked up to the SurreySchools website.  The blog was implemented last year to replace our school newspaper as well as having the ability to update any important data to our parents inside the district our outside.  All administration have access to this blog and one of our office staff updates it in a moment notice.  The blog ranges from important information to accolades of our students and staff.  When parents sign up for the blog they get an email anytime something comes up, so they don't have to go to the site, they can read what's going on with their phone or at their work office.  No surprise, most schools are doing this.  But the goal is to now get parents to be aware of this change and to get them to sign up.

Our Base Data Survey (please do not submit the survey as you will corrupt the data) is below.  We used Google Forms for it which gives you an excel sheet as well as graphs your results for you.

 

The results of this survey will be in the next blog.

Individual Goals of our School

Someone Requested that I publish this again in regards to individual Goals for Professional Development for staff, so I thought I would do it again.  So here it is...

The school is on the upswing of considering goals, what the staff wish to develop this year, and where they wish to grow professionally. Teachers took some time and seriously considered their answers when filling out a questionnaire that helped guide them to what learning they wished to pursue.  It's an revised list from the first year the Professional Development committee did this last year (see this link to visit the first document).  The document was created to generate thinking, dig deep into what staff was considering doing, and also to help the Professional Development Committee put together networks at our school and outside of our school to continue the learning.  A copy was given to the Pro D committee, a list was comprised, and pairing started to happen, as well as giving out of resources online and in our school to help them with their learning.  From the data received, this Pro D we held workshops on Blogging, Twitter, and learning how to use a Document Reader. 

 The list of goals is long but when you look at it in total, there is a common theme.  Most of the research is in the manner of learning how to improve communication with students, teachers, and parents, in their assessment, their aide at home, and in their learning with new networks of teachers both inside the school and outside the school, for the purpose of building networks of learning and support for the students, with the students.  The goal is to create student ownership and pride in their learning, creating independent and confident learners.  

This does seem like a lofty goal, but one that can be achieved by many of our staff.  Below is an example of the goal sheets teachers filled out.

I hope this information helps you to change the paradigm of learning in our school.  The staff's pride in their school and in their learning is evident.

Teacher's Goal Sheets

Teacher Initiative for Professional Success –

One Step at a Time

Individual Professional Development Plan

Name: ___________________________________________________________

Date: ____________________________________________________________

1.     Who You Are Use the diagram below to briefly outline your strengths, weaknesses, interests and experience as they relate to your professional life.

Strengths	Weaknesses
Interests	Experience

2.     What You Want: Write your professional goal statement
This year I want to…

3.     Why You Want It: Provide a rationale
I want to achieve this goal so I can…

4.     How Does It Fit: Describe the connection between this goal and your teaching assignment.

5.     How You’ll Achieve It: Set a plan
To reach this goal, I will…

6.    What Will Help You: Identify allies and resources
The following can help me achieve my goal:
PEOPLE (colleagues in this school & elsewhere, parents, district personnel, other school districts, etc.)

BOOKS (don’t forget to check out our professional library and/or recommend titles)

ORGANISATIONS/OTHER

7.     Assessment
What would progress on this goal look like in terms of your teaching practice? How will you know when you have grown in your learning?  What can you show to other teachers to substantiate your growth? 

8.     Professional Experiences I Want to Have

9.     Things I Want to Do Less (Or Stop Doing) in My Teaching Practice

10. Things I Want to Do More (Or Start Doing) in My Teaching Practice

11. Things I Want to Learn About

Revised from Nicole Painchaud, Jennifer Spain, 2012  and Jim Burke, The Teacher’s Daybook, (Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH); 2012

Working with Communicating with Students & Parents.

My Guest Blogger this time is S. Brine, a Social Studies Teacher at our school who loves trying anything new that engages the students.  The following is her research and learning today.

My goal: a website

During the Pro-D at the end of summer in 2011, I set my goal: to create a website that would meet the needs of students and parents.  Using Webnode as my template, I put together a site that allowed students and parents to view a weekly run-down of what to expect in Social Studies class, check homework assignments and due dates, view test dates (along with what to expect on the test), and have access to links that connected them to important documents (unit overviews, course outlines, expectations, etc.)  The website also provided numerous ways to contact me and strongly encouraged both students and parents to do so at any time. 

What really happened: a website and Twitter and a document reader

Upon completion of my website, I proudly wrote out the address for the students and asked them to use it often to keep themselves informed throughout the course.  One of my grade 10 students respectfully informed me that they didn’t really ‘use the Internet’ but rather relied on Twitter for information.  This particular class made it clear to me that if I truly wanted to be technologically savvy with my students, I would need to use what they used.  I created an account and tweeted reminders about homework.  More importantly, I sent out tweets that informed students the website was updated.  This helped remind them of my website and they began checking it on a regular basis.  So my goal became larger and I was able to both complete and manage the website this year and become familiar with Twitter and how it can be a wonderful tool to further connect me with students and my larger educational community.  I am now in the process of learning about my new document reader and how it can provide an opportunity to not only aid instruction, but record photos and video that can be uploaded to my website.     

What worked:

What worked for me was having the time to develop the website and the time to learn how to format it so it looked the way I wanted it to.  I enjoyed having my own time during Pro-D to put it all together and ask for help when needed.  The goal was mygoal and it was very satisfying to meet it.  With the updated wireless and the strong support from Nicole in particular, I was excited to experiment with and play with technology.  This school year, I have had more contact with parents than ever before as more are willing to contact me via e-mail and check the website to stay informed as to what their child is doing in my class.  It has made the whole teaching/learning experience much more open and transparent. 

What didn’t work:

I would have found more value in working with a small group of people who had similar goals to mine.  Having the time alone to concentrate on my goals was appreciated, but I would have enjoyed the collaboration with other staff members as well from time to time.  I also would have enjoyed a session where teachers would be able to show what they had accomplished or report out their experience with technology.


I agree, the teachers need to share and show their learning.  Next year, the Pro D days.