How Different Communications Options can Support the Classroom

Technology: It's SCIENCE!

Technology has reshaped the way teachers communicate with parents and teachers, and the way they monitor professional development information. For decades parent-teacher conferences dominated the interaction opportunities between parents and teachers. With the telephone teachers are able to engage in long distance synchronous communication with the parents to offer up time-sensitive information that may pertain to disciplinary problems or an issue the child has in learning the current material. Electronic mail, e-mail, allows for asynchronous communication with a single parents for less time-sensitive discussions or to contact multiple parents at once. Teacher websites and blogs become repositories of information where students and parents alike can access the class syllabus, educational outline, or find suggestions for extra study material (Maloy 123).

According to Maloy's Transforming Learning with New Technologies (2011) some 96 percent of students aged 9 to 17 use social networking technologies like blogging, texting, blogging, and accessing online communities (p 210). Though students are discouraged from accessing social networking while in school such tools may be useful in the form of online discussion groups or forums like Blackboard.com or Moodle.com as a kind of online study group. Teachers may choose to contact students by e-mail to send out time-sensitive information pertaining to an upcoming lesson or to allow students to ask questions privately or class hours.

Technology allows teachers to monitor their professional development information. Teacher blogs and professional networking allow them to communicate with colleagues and stay current professionally (p 219). Professional development information can also be monitored as a kind of living entity with digital portfolios. Not only containing the information of a regular paper portfolio (information about themselves, their educational goals and training) an e-portfolio or webfolio "is a goal-driven, organized collection of artifacts that demonstrates a person's expansion of knowledge and skills over time" (p 309). These e-folios allow the educator to combine their resume with audio or video recordings, examples of PowerPoint lectures, or spreadsheet databases. Examples of web-based portfolios can be found at http://portfolio.iweb.bsu.edu (as of 2012 September 18). 

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