Step 6: Help parents and students connect

  In this sixth step, Help parents and Students connect, you will learn a number of different ways you can help parents and students find and use your class blog. The aim of this step is to:

1. Explain why it’s important to help parents and students connect with your class blog.
2. Show common problems parents and students have locating class blog.
3. Suggest 21 ways you can help parents and students find and use your class blog.

Why help parents and students connect?
  All teachers know that family involvement in schooling is a key predictor of a child’s success. With many families juggling full time work and other commitments, we need to come up with new ways to keep up the levels of family involvement.  Blogging is a great way to do this.

• Class blogs are an excellent way for parents to find out what is happening in class and what their child is learning.
• Students love seeing their work published online and adore getting comments from people. Comments motivate students to write as it gives them an audience that is real.
• The blog opens up a whole new world of people who can offer encouragement and feedback.

 If you want to get the most out of your class blog, you need to help parent and students easily find your blog and engage with it. For those of you who are teaching young adults, one of the main aims be discovering ways to get your students actively engaged with your class blog .Connecting
Educating parents 
 Education is key when aiming to get families to join in your blogging community. We can not assume that parents or students bring any blogging knowledge or skills with them when they join your classroom.
 While it can be easy to educate students about blogging during your face-to-face time ( or learn with them ), it’s important to come up with different ways to educate parents. Family members will not be willing or able to get involved in blogging if they don’t know anything about it. You want your message to be clear, easily accessible, dynamic, and ongoing.
 Like students, parents have different learning preferences and it can be a good idea to offer parents a range of different ways to learn about blogging. We offer lots of ideas further on.
Finding your blog on the Internet 
 If you want families connect with your blog, it’s important that they know how to find it and return to it. This is an important step that can’t be overlooked. It’s quite common for educators new to blogging assume their class blog is easily found using Google or that students will write the blog URL correctly in their notebook. There is too much room for error with these approaches.
Searching for a teacher’s website using Google can be a very frustrating experience. There can be millions of Google search results and many teachers across the globe with the same name as you.
What you need to do
Most experienced educators use several different methods to help parents and students:

1. Understand what is a blog and how they can participate.
2. Easily find the class blog online.
3. Feel encouraged to get involved throughout the whole year. Having regular opportunities in place for education and involvement will ensure a steady pattern of engagement throughout the year.