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September 2010 | Volume 68 | Number 1 Giving Students Meaningful Work Pages 86-88
William M. Ferriter
When I look back over the 16 years of my teaching career—which has roughly paralleled the rapid development of the World Wide Web—I'm blown away by how digital tools have changed my work. Early on, I'd stop at my mailbox each morning to pick up the principal's daily memo. Today, that memo is posted on our school's website. Early on, I'd poke through our school media center's card catalog for hours after school seeking resources to use with classes. Today, an online access point lets me search the entire collection from my classroom.
In my first years teaching, I carefully entered scores in a handwritten grade book, calculating grades at the end of the quarter with a red pencil and a cheap calculator. Today, I use a digital grade book provided by my district that takes care of the calculations and gives parents immediate web-based access to their children's scores. Early on, I'd record absences on a paper list and leave it outside my door for the attendance secretary. Today, I am the attendance secretary, entering absences each day in the same digital record in which I log grades.
Nowhere is this digital shift more apparent than in communication with parents. Early on, I'd send home weekly folders stuffed with completed assignments, a photocopied newsletter outlining classroom happenings, and—if I had a bunch of extra time—personal notes to each family regarding the progress of each child. When parents wanted more information, they'd call the school and leave a message with our secretary. The entire process of touching base was time-consuming; a week of phone tag typically preceded any extended conversation.
Those kinds of rudimentary communication practices don't cut it today. Because digital tools have made instant communication and access to important information easy, most parents expect to enjoy instant communication and access to important information. Parents who are used to going online for the answer to any question just aren't willing to wait a week for a response from their child's teacher. They're often frustrated if they have to wait more than a day.
Meeting these expectations for instant communication can be intimidating. Although I'm always willing to share what we're doing in class with parents, I get overwhelmed at times by the never-ending stream of questions in my e-mail inbox. Responding to parents can eat up most of my already limited planning period. I end up pushing aside more important tasks like giving students feedback, grading papers, or designing lessons—and that has me worried. I'm jazzed that digital tools have made communicating easier, but I need more time in my day for communication!
A tool called Drop.io helps me keep afloat. Drop.io allows you to share content on customized websites. I use Drop.io to post on one easily accessible site must-see messages to parents, a description of daily class work, and tons of resources related to class projects. Instead of composing many e-mails in response to individual parent messages and sending handouts, permission slips, resource lists, and the like home with the kids, I compose one or two brief messages a day, which I post on Drop.io. These often contain links to downloadable materials or to materials I've posted elsewhere.
For example, check out these sites, which I used in my classroom last year:
To start sharing content with a group, just visit Drop.io's main page (www.drop.io) and enter a customized name for a new website you'd like to create. With one click, your new site is ready.
As with most free tools, there's nothing fancy about Drop.io. Users can add a picture to the sidebar and change the "skin"—or color scheme—of their site, but there aren't any other complicated choices. Viewers who stop by a Drop.io site see nothing more than a list of items that the "drop's" owner has shared. These can be sorted by type (such as links, documents, messages, updates) or date. I share the URL for my sites with all my students and their parents.
What makes Drop.io beautiful is that it allows users to post content to their sites in about a million different ways. If you're a hard-core techie, you can sign in to your drop and upload content using the "Add" button at the top of the screen. The advanced features of Drop .io enable you to create interactive chat boxes or embed content from third-party sources on your website.
What I view as most helpful to overwhelmed teachers is that Drop.io enables a user to post content directly from an e-mail in-box. Have a quick update that you want to share with parents? Simply write an e-mail and send it to the customized address that Drop.io automatically creates for your website. Want to share a digital copy of a handout you're using in class? Add it as an attachment to a new message and hit send; your parents and students will have access to it immediately.
Although Drop.io isn't designed to facilitate private, two-way communication with parents, it has helped reduce the number of questions in my in-box simply by reducing the time it takes to share with parents. No one is confused about class projects or due dates anymore because I'm posting updates all the time.
The work I'm doing with Drop.io isn't revolutionary. I've been uploading content, from quick messages to documents, to the Internet for the better part of a decade. The difference—and it's a big one—is that Drop.io makes uploading content easier than ever. Being able to add updates from my e-mail inbox—a place that I'm comfortable with and that I spend hours poking through—makes it more likely I'll follow through on my promise to share the kind of information necessary for making parents my partners.
William M. Ferriter (@plugusin on Twitter) teaches 6th grade language arts and social studies in Raleigh, North Carolina, and blogs about the teaching life at The Tempered Radical (http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical). He is the coauthor of Teaching the iGeneration: Five Easy Ways to Introduce Essential Skills with Web 2.0 Tools (Solution Tree, in press); 919-363-1870; wferriter@hotmail.com.
September 2010Giving Students Meaningful Work
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