EdTechTeacher iPad Summit- Boston 2013

Gaining parental support for new curriculum and instruction initiatives often problematic, but is particularly difficult in high-performing districts. In the 2012 - 2013 school year the Stratton teachers were facing the challenge of implementing Tools of the Mind (a new curriculum and instructional model for Kindergarten), the Commons Core State Standards, increasing their use of technology to support their learning goals, and piloting a new RTI model at the same time. In order to increase parental awareness and support for these initiatives the teachers at the Stratton Elementary School utilized social media - Twitter, YouTube, and blogs - to go beyond just communicating to parents the details of their initiatives, to providing regular vivid examples of what those initiatives look like in their students' classrooms by posting short weekly iMovies on YouTube. They spark parents interest in the videos by frequent Tweets throughout the week. To help foster parent-student communication about the student's learning they provide conversation starters to parents on a regular basis. This use of social media has also had an unexpected bi-product of providing a source of professional sharing among the teachers in the school. Teachers began getting ideas from their colleagues for pedagogical choices by following each other on Twitter and reading each other's blogs. By the end of the school year a short survey given to parents evidenced the strong support for these new initiatives and the new methods of communiation that the teachers had adopted.