Technology .... fail?

This year I chose to create this voicethread to introduce myself and my course to my grade 9 parents, many of which are just entering highschool with their oldest child. This time can be quite stressful for all involved and as a parent I can completely identify with how scary it is to have your kids grow up and move onto situations that you wonder if they are ready for. So with this in find I created this VT .... its not as polished as I would have liked but figured it would serve the purpose. In the final frame I invited parents to the Open House (aka "meet the creature night") the following week. A number of positive emails arrived and indications that they would drop by - I was pumped!

 

Parent night arrives and I'm ready with my list of students at the ready so that I could keep track of all those who arrived - I was sure that this year was going to be great!  As it turned out after two hours of standing around making small talk, I had been introduced to 7 sets of parents ... SEVEN ... of the 100 possible.  Ahhhhhh!  I was so disheartened.  Many of my colleagues were not surprised at the low turnout as it has been like this for the last 5-10 years, sometimes feeling like there were more staff than parents.  I had always attributed this to the lack of contact there was initially with grade 9 parents in early September along with the students telling their parents that no one actually goes to these.  (I've been teaching long enough to remember a day when Meet the Teacher nights were VERY well attended).  What my colleagues didn't know was that I had contacted all 100 of my parents via email last week, sharing the voicethread and personally inviting them to the open house.  How could I have been so wrong?  A friend asked me if this was an indication of how "disengaged parents have become with their child's education" .... wow, I sure hope not.

After a bit more reflection I am now wondering :

• Did the VT provide them the visual information that they didn't feel the need to attend - they had already heard and seen me
• My class webspace is quite visual and full of information .... am I putting TOO much information out there so they once again feel informed enough that they don't need to meet me face to face?  Since the time that I have had a class website, my numbers at parent night have been dropping.  
• Is this just a high school phenomena or is it true for lower levels too?
• Are parents getting the information via email .... I didn't get many bounced messages, but are they not checking email? Is email old school for them as well?  Should they be texted?
• Is the set up of the evening turning parents off?  If we reverted back to "Meet the Teacher Night" from the "Open House" idea, would it be more inviting?
• Is it worth starting an email campaign in late June, early July to start preparing parents for the transition to high school? 

At the end of all of this I am trying to figure out if this situation happened due to technology, or can we solve the problem by using the technology we have, in a better way?  .....

Voicethread - digging for ideas

A few weeks into my field study and the quality of group interactions had really not improved much, even after class discussions and suggestions.  The collaboration part was completely missing - everyone completed their piece of the puzzle and didn't even bother to check or edit anyone else's work.  Did they even know what collaboration was?? This was a very good question that Carol asked me one evening at LTT.  I assumed they did ... but in fact maybe I was completely mistaken.  With my one scheduled computer lab time coming up I set up a voicethread asking the class about collaboration, what it meant, how it could be done, what challenges there were etc and gave them the task of posting and reading others' answers.  This was a new experience for them but they were all able to contribute in some way.  It was really nice for them to have the opportunity to see what other class members wrote.  As I looked through their responses it became clear to me that they understood collaboration as group work rather than the clarifying others' thinking.  Ah ha ... time to address this more in class.  The challenges that they had working as a group mainly related to students not buying into the process.  For some reason they did not see the learning team activities as ones that fulfilled a need for them.  Is this due to age and naivety, lack of ownership for their learning, not connecting with their team members ... or a combination of them all?

Even with these challenges there were a very positive response from the students to using voicethread  - an application that none had had previous experience with.  I may want to explore the use of voicethread a bit more in the coming months to see if there are ways it can be used to facilitate student learning.

Collaboration Voicethread