Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

It’s always a challenge for many teachers and school administrators to maintain or level up parent engagement in schools. They don’t like attending meetings and school-related activities because they believe they’re not that important. They could always keep themselves up to date by asking their children or fellow parents. However, this shouldn’t be the case because whether they like it or not, it is their responsibility to provide quality education to their children, including having a good relationship with teachers, school principals, and others.

Now, what can schools do to enhance parent engagement? How can they encourage parents to be more active in their children’s lives in school? For many years now, schools have been using Edtech as a way of improving teaching and learning. It’s about time they use Edtech as well to strengthen the participation of parents in schools. 

Here are some great ideas for boosting parent engagement through Edtech:

By MATTHEW LYNCH

Look for a user-friendly platform with excellent communication tools.

Edtech tools should be intuitive and user-friendly for everyone. Whether through messaging, chat, notifications, or any other medium, a good platform must have all the necessary communication tools. For example, teachers need to send information to parents now and then. To save time and effort, teachers can use Edtech to send their message to every parent instantly. An excellent example of a user-friendly platform is Pedagogue. Teachers can create stream-based or virtual classrooms and invite teachers to join.   Teachers can use them to send messages and information to parents instantly.

Train parents.

Before using new tools, parents need training themselves, too. During a parent-teacher meeting, for example, you can set a session up in which you explain which tools you’re planning to use for the whole school year and what the benefits of these tools are to students and parents. Parents should also be informed about the accounts that everybody will be using. Additionally, they should be informed about privacy matters and how they intend to protect everybody’s’ safety online. 

Communicate through email

Do you want to provide feedback to parents about their children without having them visit you at school? Do you want to keep them posted on classroom or school activities and send them photos and videos of the class? You can do so by emailing parents. Email is a great way to establish good communication with parents. It’s also more private and personalized.

Make a blog

Edtech makes it possible for everybody to be heard. A good example would be to have a  class blog that’s exclusive to parents. You can ask them to share some parenting tips, share their family adventures, and much more. This blog must be accessible to all the parents in your class, and if everybody agrees, you can make it public. It’s a fun way to learn from each other and, at the same time, bring out the creative and techie side of parents.

With the help of Edtech, schools can now boost parents’ engagement for the welfare of their children’s education. 

Discover more about EdTech resources with RobotLAB!