I ran my first parent workshop in March 2011. It’s a stand out moment as we were sharing information about a potential 1:1 laptop program and as a true 'Type A' personality, I still have the slide deck.
Since then, I have run dozens of parent workshops and consider them to be an essential part of any EdTech Leader’s role. As my department has increased, we have begun to explore the value of hosting parent sessions for a specific division. Our Primary School Digital Coach partnered with our lower and upper Primary School Counsellors to host well attended and well reviewed parent sessions last year and is keen to continue and expand this year. The goal of any parent technology and learning session is the same:
In short, we want parents to feel empowered to make informed choices about their child's use of digital technologies, to know that it's ok to take the laptop away when their 11 year old has been doing homework (and Netflix and Instagram and SnapChat) for 3 hours. It's therefore important for us to share a little of what our expectations and procedures are with regards to digital devices at school. I recently hosted a session for Grade 6 parents. With their children new to our school’s laptop program, we are keen to hear their concerns and give support and guidance on how to manage their child’s screentime. Prior to the session, we sent parents a form, inviting them to add any questions they had. This served two purposes; firstly, it meant we could tailor the session to address the most pressing concerns (as opposed to guessing or worse, just telling families what we thought they might want to hear) and secondly, it meant we had insight into the feelings and concerns of the whole community. Every session is a partnership, most often between the Head of Personal Counselling and I. For this recent session, our Head of Grade 6 came and was able to address questions that related specifically to expectations for students in their first year of Middle School and our Head of Middle School and our Middle School Counsellors were also in attendance. In taking this approach, our aim is to send a nonverbal message that talking about technology is not just a conversation to have with the EdTech team, it is a conversation you can have with anyone at the school.
As a side note, I tend to play a mental game of ‘chicken’ with parent sessions- it is possible to have more faculty present than parents- that wasn’t the case on this occasion and needless to say, we expect a high turn-out for any session related to Social Media.
This was a purely informational session and while some parents likened it to ‘drinking from the firehose’ we enjoyed positive feedback and are looking forward to mapping the parent sessions for the coming year.
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About the AuthorPassionate about learning, creativity, innovation and tech. Brit Abroad keen to work with others to make the world a little kinder. Archives
April 2019
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