Blog #3 School Web Site

Observations

My question was how to improve parent communication with use of a school web site.

My biggest concern, after building the web site, was to get the parents to actually use the site. In the first 4 months after setting up the site, I had registered less than 50 hits on the site. ( some of those could have been students too) I had put little articles in our weekly newsletter "advertising" that we now had a site and included the URL. Still little improvement in hits.

Last month, we decided to have our PAC meeting focus on technology. We usually have a very good turnout at PAC meetings and figured that this would be one way to introduce the school site to the parents. That night we had 28 parents in attendance. After a brief "business" meeting, all the parents were brought down to the lab to view the site. This was a learning experience for everyone. I quickly found out that our parents have little or no experience with computers, although their children are quite literate in that field. I had placed cards at each computer with the school's URL on it, thinking that they would log into the computer, go to the brower and promptly end up at the site. Wrong! About 5 parents were able to get to the site with little or no difficulty. The remaining parents, many of whom did not know how to use a mouse, needed a lot of assistance. Thankfully there were 2 administrators, a translator, as well as 2 teachers to help the parents. I used the projector in the lab to show a "big picture" of the various aspects of our site. Many of the parents were now frustrated enough to just watch me show them how they could order uniform clothing, visit class web sites that are linked, view pictures of special events and their comments were very positive.

I also showed the parents an example of a class web sit ( mine ) and they were most impressed with being able to access their child's class site to view student work and class pictures.

At the end of the presentation, I wanted the parents to complete the on-line survey, giving me some feedback of the usefulness of the site. Unfortunately, when all 28 parents logged into the survey, the system jammed up and they were unable to complete the questions. I did notice that a number of parents logged in to the site at home and completed it from there.

We have also introduced the web site to our grade 3 - 5 students and hopefully they are showing their parents the site at home. The students' comments have been very positive. One teacher even had her students introduce the site to their parents as a homework assignment.

One of the links on the school site is to the Kindergarten Punjabi site where students and parents are able to listen to a story being read both in English and Punjabi. The cross communication in both languages is a crucial issue at Sayers.

I will continue to monitor the school web site survey and hopefully increase parent participation. The real problem seems to be that our parents have great difficulty using a computer and this could be another goal for a PAC meeting.