Mrs. English

  Using technology as a means of communication with my students' families has been of utmost importance, even pre-pandemic. Due to the advancement of technology, most of my students' families prefer electronic forms of communication to paper, phone call, or in-person. Since the majority of my students' families are non-native English speakers, they have voiced that the electronic means of communication are preferred because they can more easily get these messages translated. Translation apps such as Google Translate and the like are simply tools and are not reliable, so this is both a strength and a weakness of digital communication; however, this is the technology on which what many of my families rely. I have personally found TalkingPoints to be another effective app for communication, but have never tried it for larger pieces of information that need to be communicated. A major strength of digital communication is the ease with which to communicate. With smart

     As a K-12 English Language Specialist whose teaching assignment varies from year-to-year, I would have to be creative with the ways in which I utilize blogs in my classroom.  Since my current teaching context is in the K-6 setting, I will mainly focus this post on that for fear of the longest blog post detailing all the possible ways I could use it in the classroom/as an educator.     It would probably be best for me to use it as an electronic newsletter of sorts, and in a perfect world, would love to use it as a means to communicate with parents visually what we are doing in the classroom.  I could see this as possibly being monumental for many of my students' families since many of them want to know how else they can help their child(ren).  Visually showing them what we are doing can provide insight and spark ideas for ways in which they can help their children.  It can also put a visual to what is mentioned in parent meetings and conferences.  I would have to keep posts rel