Schools are finding new ways to use technology to engage parents, which will be the topic of a one-hour Education Week webinar on Thursday, Feb. 28 at noon ET.
Connecting Parents and Schools Via Social Media Initiatives will cover innovative methods from using Skype to run parent-teacher conferences, to live streaming PTA meetings.
The webinar will also explore the issue of how to overcome disparities in access and know-how caused by socioeconomic differences among families. Some districts are forging partnerships and providing resources to help parents become more digitally literate.
Featured speakers will be:
- Principal Joseph Mazza of Knapp Elementary School in Pennsylvania’s North Penn School District,
- Elisabeth Stock, chief executive officer and co-founder, Computers For Youth.
Education Week contributing writer Nora Fleming will moderate the panel. She wrote about this issue, including Mazza’s emphasis on digital technologies to improve school-parent communication. Knapp Elementary is hardly an uncomplicated school environment: 40 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and 22 languages are represented.
Mazza has been a trailblazer in connecting with parents on Twitter, Facebook, a parent-school Wiki, virtual chat, blog, and a Google text line.
Computers for Youth provides computer training for parents and children, having served more than 50,000 families in 13 years in New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The program works with schools where at least 75 percent of students are eligible for subsidized lunch.
To register for the webinar, which is free, visit this link.