Students who know about regular communication between their parents and teachers tend to show more effort and perform better in school. On the other hand, kids from schools where there’s no parent-teacher communication, often end up pitting the two against each other. It proves counterproductive and creates problems for all three stakeholders. Studies have already demonstrated how the involvement of parents in their child’s school activities can motivate their kids to display high-quality work habits. Such kids perform better in class.
For achieving this, there needs to be a positive relationship between parents and the child’s teachers. Parent-teacher communication plays a crucial role in establishing this relationship.
Parents working in full-time jobs may not find time to show up at the classroom door very often. Some of them find it difficult to attend the parent-teacher meeting as well. But, today’s technology-rich world has solutions for almost every problem. Here’re five tools used by schools and colleges to ensure smooth communication between parents, teachers, and students.
Social media channels
When it comes to handling basic queries about school or college’s policies and procedures, social media channels can be the best tool in town. They are an essential part of a long-term communication strategy for many schools. Twitter and Facebook can help in building a rapport with parents. They can also help in portraying the institute’s culture and strengthen their identity.
Sharing information about various classroom activities, curriculum details, attendance percentages, and other activities can make the school or college more appealing.
Social media presence is also crucial for reputation management. Rumors or negative comments about a school or college can impact its image. Social media presence can ensure the institute can revert on comments and suggestions promptly. Even parents prefer using social media to get answers to their basic queries.
Apps for administration and parent-teacher communication
In this era of IoT and 5G, there’s an app for almost everything. Educational app developers like MyEdu offer administrative as well as communication apps.
Educational intuitions like schools, colleges, and coaching institutions use in-house administrative apps for managing day-to-day affairs. From tracking school attendance, premise security aspects, to tracking the working hours for guest lecturers, organizational apps can manage data for almost everything like ERP systems.
The second type of smartphone application used by educational institutions is for communication purposes. They make parent-teacher-student communication easy. The data about the student’s attendance, GPS location data for the school bus, assignment performance, exam results, and subject-wise teachers’ observations can be made available to parents via the app. The child’s guardians can review it and share their opinion with the concerned teacher as per their convenience.
Guardians can also share their doubts, questions with teachers using the same software. Some schools even send fee reminder notifications and allow parents to pay the same via the app instantly.
Several free and paid app frameworks offer advanced features. They are compatible with most of the other systems in schools, including the school attendance software. Data can be shared instantly and made available to parents within minutes.
Most importantly, applications can be used for sharing study material in the form of PDF, audio, and video files with parents. Besides schools and universities, many edu-startups have launched their smartphone applications for students in India during the last five years.
Emails and text messages
According to stats, around 60.08 percent of internet traffic in Asia comes from mobile devices. Users open their emails on smartphones while on the go. Email opening can occur at any point in the day. Thus, if the school or college ensures its emails sent to parents are optimized for mobile devices, there is a higher chance of parents reading and reverting on the same.
Due to a lack of space on the device, some smartphone users in developing countries prefer to install just a few essential apps. Such parents may not show a willingness to install school apps. So, emails or text messages can prove to be the best option to send various alerts to such parents. Emails can also be a perfect medium to reach parents who do not have a smartphone but do have access to emails while at work.
Podcasting
Professors can use audio podcasts to deliver lectures to students who remained unavailable during the session at the school or college. Lectures can be recorded using simple digital tools. MP3 audio files can be made available on the website as well as on parent and student apps.
Podcasting is a relatively new idea in the field of education in India. However, several institutions offer podcasts to their regular as well as distance learning students in the US and the UK. Students can listen to the material while on the go or in the comfort of their homes.
Overall, out of all the available options, developing an app seems to be the most beneficial one for schools and colleges to manage communication. If your school or college wishes to develop a smartphone application for parent-teacher-student communication or the organization’s administrative functions, you should discuss your needs with MyEdu. Their team also has experience in developing a smart attendance system for schools.
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