Dissemination: Unit 5 
Q766 Technology Leadership
10/14/05, Anita Phipps

The Dissemination Process
Overview:

As a technology aware and (overly?) concerned parent, I have had my best interactions with my children’s school and teacher when an informative website and email are available. I strongly feel that it is becoming critical for schools to maintain functional, updated websites and that classroom teachers be granted time and training to develop and maintain useful web pages. This may seem like tall order, but with the tools available today, it is an attainable goal. And, it is a goal that should be given high priority. 

My children attend Miami-Dade County Public Schools. This district is well known for its poor management and corruption and I have many complaints. As with any district, there are gems in the mess, and sometimes they do something right. In the case of MDPS they have created an Education Portal that goes a fair way to meeting the needs of parents and students to get information. Each school is given web space for a school site and most have at least a homepage posted. Unfortunately, there is not sufficient motivation or training for teachers to take that last step, in most cases, to make a class web page/site or to regularly update a page they have created, so that it is effective. I agree with Doug Johnson from our readings: 

“…teacher-created Web pages available on the Internet can help simplify communication and planning efforts. Sure, most if not all of the information an actively involved parent might like to have could be made available through printed materials sent home with students and through earlier, more regularly scheduled face-to-face conferences. But as we all know, print material sometimes doesn’t make it home or out of the backpack. Conferences are difficult to schedule and are real time eaters. The Web can help overcome these problems.” http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/sep00/johnson.htm

On of my children’s teachers this year uses the classroom web site feature at Scholastic.com1. I am taking that example, combined with Doug Johnson’s proposal, to formulate a method for dissemination of information to the school community. I am looking at the problem from the point of view of the classroom teacher and parents. I take the approach that if a process can be defined so that it can be replicated, then training can be provided broadly across the school. Later, that process can be replicated across a district. My audience for this paper and to develop this process is the parents and students in one fifth grade class. The name of my school is Hernandez Home school, so that I can access the Scholastic.com service and comply with their licensing agreement. (It would be an interesting experiment to use this service in a home school environment, but that would be another paper.) My purpose is to outline the type of information that should be regularly available to parents and students and methods for delivering that information. 

Building a Process:

Using the example of Miami-Dade Public Schools’ Education Portal2 we can see that school each can be located and most have web sites. (Click through “schools”, “school information”, “elementary schools” to see an example of the school pages.) The process I define would require each school have a website, and each class have a webpage. For purposes of this analysis, I am assuming the district has provided a reasonably easy to use web building tool accessible to administrators and teachers similar to the tool available at the Scholastic site, but possibly more versatile. I am also assuming that this process will result in robust school website so that teachers can link to school-wide as well as district-wide resources.

Information that should be required on a class web page might include:
	Contact details: Room number, phone number and email for the teacher
	Classroom rules: Link to school handbook online, and class specific notes
	School calendar
District Calendar
	Assignment due dates	
	
Examples of optional information might include:
Field Trips
	Class projects
	Resources

Dissemination Methods:

Technology available to the students will be well and appropriately used when students and parents (and teachers) know about it. Some of those resources are web based and can be accessed “any place, any time” while others are available only in the classroom. By referencing specific tools and resources in assignments and projects, the classroom community becomes aware of what is available and how it is being put to use. In the HernandezHomeschool example, district resources River Deep and FCAT Explorer are referenced in Software Lists; the Accelerated Reader is a school resource and is referenced in Online Activities; and classroom resources are emphasized in the Muggins Math activity and the preparation assignment for the Tide Pool field trip. All of these assignments and references highlight the technology and learning tools that are available in the HernandezHomeshool. As the teacher builds the classroom site and incorporates more of the available technologies into classroom assignments, the classroom community becomes aware of how their classroom is using their technology resources, IF they are visiting the website. Now, to get them to login and have a look!

Doug Johnson has a good point: send home notices to alert parents to the class home page. We can go one further, we can think up clever ways to give them a real reason to visit the site. There should be “regular” notices home with the children. They should make the usual sorts of announcements and “point” parents to the site. Some example topics may include:

Field Trip Announcement: We are getting ready for our first field trip. Students have an assignment to explore and gather information about TidePools. Please visit our website on the Scholastic.com homepage for more details.

New Poetry corner on our webpage! Please visit us at www.classpage.com to read what our work. We have been working very hard and would like to share our work with you!

Schools that use agendas can have students place reminders for parents to check the web page for details about the No Uniform Day Fundraiser or to get their Accelerated Reader points or help choosing a book for Free Reading from the AR list. Students are great motivators: they can nag the life out of a parent to get them to read a web page!

Lastly, in all school communications, there should be a web site address and a note to “visit our website for more information”. Sometimes the objective is simply to encourage parents into a new habit of communication.

Summary:

To meet the challenge of sharing information about technology to a school community, one approach would be to start at the bottom and work up. As each class in a school begins to promote their site; as the school begins to promote its site; as the district can begin to say that many-most-all of its schools have sophisticated, effective websites, momentum will build. Parents are surrounded by many of these technologies everyday. As they begin to see examples of how the web is being used for research, or computers are implemented for problem solving, they will begin to expect that they will continue to be used. Creating expectations among the parents will have them looking for the technology, and that will by nature “trickle up” to the district level.
 Notes:

1Scholastic Class Homepage Builder:
http://teacher.scholastic.com/tools/

2Miami-Dade Public School, Education Portal
http://www2.dadeschools.net/index.htm

Scholastic Main Page
http://www.scholastic.com 
You can see an example page of the Scholastic Classroom Homepage builder from the Scholastic Main Page. Scroll to the bottom right and click on “Class Homepage” in the Free Services box.  

School name: HernandezHomeschool 
Password: welcomehome. 

This page is a sample, and does not contain all of the required or optional components mentioned here.

Tide pools
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/edgeofsea/tidepool.html

Muggins Math
http://www.mugginsmath.com/

Book List descriptions were taken from:  http://www.weberpl.lib.ut.us/booklists/books.php?BookListID=15&SortOrder=Author