As an early childhood educator, parents are entrusting you with their precious babies. In doing so, you are expected to wear many hats– a coach, a mediator, and a teacher to name a few. But probably the most important role you have is as a communicator. You need to be a good communicator with your students and peers, but maybe most importantly with parents. While this can be a daunting task, approaching communication through a variety of avenues is manageable and makes all the difference in strengthening your partnership with parents.

Beginning of the Year Parent Communication

Letter of introduction - This may be the simplest one, but is often overlooked. Before school starts, send a letter to your students families introducing yourself and welcoming them to your class. What is your teaching experience, your teaching philosophy, your expectations of students and parents? Share a little about your personal life too—your family and hobbies are a good place to start. Include a picture if possible. Putting a face with a name will help ease those first day jitters.

Home visits - If you have the time, home visits can be the most powerful way of getting to know your students and families and laying the groundwork for good communication. Offer the option to families so you can meet on “their home turf.” Optimally this would occur before school starts, but some families may be wary about inviting you into their home before they have established a relationship with you. There shouldn’t be an agenda for the brief visit (under 30 minutes), but you might ask the child to show you his/her room and consider taking a family picture during your visit which can be used in the classroom later.

Meet the Teacher/Orientation - Most schools offer some sort of meet the teacher before school starts, but my favorite is having separate ones for the parents and the children. Invite parents for their own orientation during the evening. If they’ve already received your letter of introduction, this is the optimal time to go more in depth about the curriculum, schedule, and goals. Make sure you include expectations for communication! How can they best reach you? Should they expect daily, weekly or monthly written communication from you in the form of a newsletter? How quickly should they expect an email response from you? Remember, they are entrusting their babies in your care and they want to know everything!

In addition to an orientation for parents, an orientation for children is a MUST! If possible, schedule small groups to come visit the class during small time blocks varying with age. Given them a tour of the classroom and then let them explore or interact with the other children. During this time, you might also have a special art activity or the give them the opportunity to pick their nametag or cubby.

Phone Conferences - After the first month or so of school, share a phone conversation with the parents of your students. You have been observing and getting to know their children and this is a good time to share some early observations. It is a great time to listen to the parents; to find out how their goals for their child for the school year. Certainly, these types of conferences can (and should) take place anytime through out the year, but I’ve found this early one to be instrumental in building the parent-teacher relationship.

Parent Communication Throughout the Year

Newsletters - Newsletters have always been a great form of communication and nothing has changed there. What may have changed is the avenue through which you share your newsletter. Remind parents of upcoming events, share parenting tips, and include pictures of children at school. Rarely do I print newsletters anymore. Now, they are emailed and posted to the website. What a great way to save time, money, and the environment!

Class or School Website - In the 21st century, the first place we head for information is our electronic devices. Having basic information available online is a great way to communicate with parents while also marketing yourself and your school to prospective parents. If you share pictures of students, make sure you have parent permission and refrain from using last names if you have captions.

In addition to our school website which has basic information for the community, our main communication tool is MemberHub. This is the one, secure place teachers and parents can find everything for our school. From the calendar to newsletters to class photo albums, you name it it’s here. I can also send short announcements (via email or text message) to parents reminding them to turn in picture orders or bring in show ‘n tell.

Notes or Calls Home - Have you ever received the dreaded note home from school? Sometimes you have no other choice to share an issue with parents. When you must do so, make sure you sandwich the not so good news with something positive both before and after. And even better yet, is to get into the habit of sending positive notes home. If you are in the practice of communicating with parents through “just because” positive notes, then if you have to share the negative news the parents might be more receptive to hearing it. When you only communicate bad news, parents tend to tune out!

Social Media - While you may occasionally find a family without a computer or email address, this is definitely the exception rather than the norm. In this information age, you have to meet parents where they are. Take advantage of the technology and communicate with parents via Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

End of Year Parent Communication

Conferences - While fall phone conferences help build rapport between parent and teacher and we might communicate electronically on a frequent basis, face-to-face conferences are still a must. This is a great time to share your observations along with student samples and suggestions for home activities to support the child’s growth an development.

Thank You Notes - Why should you be thanking parents? You might think it should be the other way around. Thank parents for the opportunity to learn and grow with their children. Even for those challenging students (and sometimes especially for those challenging students), a note of thanks goes a long way.

I’ll leave you with a few final words of advice: be positive (you get more of what you focus on), think before you speak (take a deep breath before speaking or writing when upset) and be careful with email (great for a quick response or update, but also easy to be misinterpreted). While doing all of these may seem daunting at first, pick and choose what works for you and you’ll be on the way to completing the puzzle of effective parent communication. It will ultimately make your job easier and parents will appreciate it too!

About the Author

This is a guest blog post from Beth Dickinson. Beth spent five years teaching primary grades in public school before having children. She has spent eight years as a preschool director including the last six years as the Director at Hayes Barton Baptist Preschool in Raleigh, NC.

If you’re in the early childhood education field you probably know that there is an ever-increasing amount of networks and online sources for ECE professionals to get the latest news and resources. I’ve personally gotten to know quite a few experts in the ECE field and can recognize when there’s good content that needs to be shared. So we’ve decided to start a monthly newsletter geared specifically to helping Early Childhood Education professionals find that content.

Our new monthly ECE Newsletter from MemberHub will contain:

• A link to our latest ECE related post on the MemberHub blog
• A handful of links to recent “must-read” articles on the web
• News or thoughts on one of our ECE customers
• The latest news on our communication platform, MemberHub

You’re busy and finding the latest and best content on the web can be challenging. Hopefully this new newsletter will be of great value to you.

Our first newsletter will hit inboxes on Wednesday May 15th. It will feature content on parent communication and other interesting news.

We REALLY want your feedback…

PLEASE share your feedback on this new process. We really want this to be helpful. If it’s not it’s a waste of your time and ours. If you leave a comment I WILL READ IT. I hope you’ll consider sharing what kind of content you’d find helpful.

One of the challenges that organizations have experienced with MemberHub is the ability to communicate at multiple levels within their organization. For example, many of you have created an organization-wide hub, but you’ve always had to remember to add new people to that hub along with any other groups they  need to collaborate with. A new feature in MemberHub called Hub Trees is designed to help our customers communicate more efficiently at all levels in their organization.

Hub Trees allow Organization Administrators to group hubs within hubs. This allows admins to:

• Mimic their organizational structure
• Communicate at multiple levels (i.e., school wide all the way to a classroom level)
• Automatically add and remove people from hubs higher up the tree.

When you create a new Hub, you’ll see a dropdown field to select a Parent Hub. The top-most Hub in your organization will NOT have a parent and can be referred to as the Root Hub. Hubs underneath the root will specify the Root hub as its Parent Hub. Each hub can also have sub-hubs if you create more hubs that name it as its parent.

NOTE: Only Organization Administrators will see this Parent Hub field.

To edit an existing Hub’s Parent Hub, simply click on the Hub Settings button inside the Hub change the Parent Hub value and click the Save Changes button.

What Happens When You Specify a Parent Hub

The main thing that occurs is that all people/members in a given hub are automatically added to its Parent Hub. In that way, you can place one person at the lowest level hub and they’ll automatically be added (with an indirect affiliation) to its Parent Hub, on up the line to the Root Hub. This makes it easy on administrators to not have to worry about adding people in multiple hubs.

Hub Tree Example

Here’s an example of an elementary school that uses Hub Trees. The Root Hub is simply the name of the school. Then they have a hub for each grade level in the school and put the classroom hubs underneath the appropriate grade-level hubs.

This means that people can be added to their teacher’s classroom Hub and they’ll automatically be added to the grade-level Hub and the school-wide hub.

This also means that the school can easily communicate with all staff and parents by creating an Announcement (for example) in the school-wide hub or even just communicate, let’s say, with all the staff and parents for 2nd grade classrooms.

Whadda Ya Think?

There has been a handful of customers that have helped test the Hub Tree feature and so far the feedback has been great. We certainly hope that this new feature will help your organization to further centralize your communication efforts and get even more value from MemberHub.

Please leave us a comment below and let us know what you think. As always, if you need help, just contact us anytime.

Is preschool a worthwhile investment for our country? This will certainly be a hotly debated topic over the coming years in light of Obama’s Preschool for Every Child initiative.

The folks at Education News have put together a nice infographic (scroll to end of post) that supports the case for preschool.

They start with some basic stats:

• There are currently over 11 million unemployed in the US
• 2.3 million people are incarcerated
• 42.6 million people are living below the poverty line

What does preschool have to do with these numbers? Can it can start to reverse these trends?

• Kids who attend preschool are 20% more likely to graduate high school
• They are half as likely to be arrested
• Grown-ups who attended preschool earn an average of 50% more than non-preschoolers
• Every $1 invested in preschool saves taxpayers up to $13 in future costs

Education News concludes that:

Even though it may seem like a glorified play time to some, preschool nonetheless touts huge long and short-term benefits for those who attend.

What do you think? What are you conclusions of these statistics? Do your eyes glaze over while reading these statistics?

Underwood Elementary, a GT Magnet Elementary School in Wake County, NC has been using MemberHub for the past year. They launched the use of the service over the summer of 2012 with the goal of strengthening communication among teachers and parents at the school.

I recently spoke with Andrea Trowell, the Media and Technology Specialist at Underwood and we discussed the schools growing passion for MemberHub. Andrea sent out a survey to teachers and parents about communication within the school using MemberHub. Here is what they have to say:

How are you using MemberHub?

• “I use it as a class website.”
• “to receive emails, text, sending out weekly updates, calendar, class messages.”
• “As a room parent to share needs for the classroom, upcoming class events and sharing general information. Very cool tool!”

How is MemberHub helpful for you?

• “Keeps me up to date without having to remember to ‘go check’ something”
• “It provides a centralized place to communicate with classroom parents.”
• “Awesome for class wide communication and parent/teacher communication”
• “I love being able to shoot an email out to our room parent super quick and let the know of a classroom need or a teacher request.”
• “I feel connected to what’s happening without being inundated with lots of separate emails.”

And the verdict is……

• “Please Keep it!”
• “Fantastic. I am always informed.”
• “Can’t imagine life without it!!”
• “So glad we elected to utilize this communication and organizational hub”
• “I appreciate the email communication and the way that PTA representatives are so responsive!”
• “It is working well!”

Thank you for the responses Underwood and thank you for using MemberHub! Also, thank you to Andrea for her endorsement of the system and desire to spread its use (she’s currently promoting the use of it at her older children’s Middle School in Raleigh!).

So, how is communication going at your Elementary School? Won’t you start a FREE trial with MemberHub and schedule a time for a personal demo? We’ll show you how Underwood uses it! 

Sending text messages has been an integral feature in MemberHub from the very beginning. Calendar event reminders can be sent via text message, but the primary way administrators send text messages is through MemberHub’s Announcements feature. We’ve made a change to Announcements that we anticipate will be well received! Essentially, we have removed the 160-character limit that was placed on new Announcements.

This new design is more flexible and also makes it much clearer as to what copy is to be sent out via email and what part is to be sent as a text message. When you create a new Announcement you have two separate and distinct fields to put the copy of your message in. There is top field where you can type unlimited amount of copy (yay!). This part of the message will be posted into the hub and sent as an email to everyone in the hub. It can also be edited after it is posted.

The second part text field is an optional field where you can place copy to be sent as a text message to everyone in the hub. This field has the 160-character limit on it and as you type it updates the character count. There is also a convenient button that will automatically copy the first 160 characters from the top field into the text message field.

Here’s a few screenshots so you can an idea of what it looks like. But go ahead and log in and try yourself!

Also, here’s what the text message looks like on an iPhone with At&t service:

Let us know what you think in the comments below. Enjoy and thank you for using MemberHub!

We’ve made some small tweaks to the Whiteboards feature. Nothing too fancy, but very much needed. As a reminder, Whiteboards are an easy way for groups to create simple signup sheets, brainstorm ideas on a particular topic, or to post additional information for members of their hub. Whiteboards have version tracking and members can edit the whiteboard content or leave a comment at the bottom.

Whiteboard Reminders

One of the most popular ways that Whiteboards are used is “virtual signup sheets”. Often signup sheets are time-sensitive in that they’re tired to an event that members of the group need to signup for. Many users found themselves sending out a Discussion or Announcement to remind members about a Whiteboard signup. We’ve made it much easier for you to send out a reminder. There’s now a link at  the bottom of a Whiteboard that allows you to quickly send an email reminder with a personal message and link to the whiteboard. Just click the link to reminder members!

A Wider View

When we created the Whiteboards feature we intentionally created a generic collaboration tool. It’s been fun to learn about all the creative ways this wiki-like feature has been used. They can be signup sheets, notes, documents or blog posts. Now you have 33% more room to continue the creativity. Enjoy the extra space!

Easier to Edit

One usability issue we realized was affecting a lot of users was the location of the Edit button. It was only at the bottom, so as a whiteboard got longer, it was harder to find that Edit button. A simple improvement was to add the Edit button to the top too. We also changed it from blue to grey so it blends into the background better.

So, how does your group use Whiteboards?

Early childhood learning programs thrive when the adults– parents, teachers, and administrators– communicate well. Of course, as a professional, you probably already know a LOT about great parent communication. This webiner will help you apply what you know using digital strategies.

Increasing Enrollment and Parent Engagement Through Social Media and Online Communication Tools

Click here to register for this FREE webinar on December 5, 2012 at 2pm ET.

MemberHub.com is sponsoring the webinar but it will be presented by Fran Simon, M.Ed., a former child care administrator who now specializes in digital engagement, marketing, and social media, will help you understand how to use digital communication strategies including social media and online tools to:

• Engage parents before they enroll, while they are enrolled, and after they leave your program
• How online tools  can help you build strong relationships and enhance parent engagement
• The right balance of communication tools, including email, text messages, phone calls, social media, newsletters and face-to-face communication

Google Places is very important to your business. As a “vendor” in your community, whether you’re a business, church, preschool or day care facility, you simply must show up on the Google map when people search for your keywords. For example, if you have a local day care in Raleigh and you want people to find you on the web when they search “Daycare  in Raleigh, NC” if you’ve registered with Google Places not only will a pin be dropped on the map, but your customers can leave Google Reviews about your organization. 

Today, I worked with a MemberHub customer who needed to register their weekday educational ministry (early childhood learning center) program as a separate listing in Google Places from the church they’re affiliated with. You see the program has it’s own website (which we built for them, by the way) and it’s own contact informaiton. It has “customers” and they are wise enough to get a professional website, use teacher-parent communication software AND…make sure they show up on the Google map!

It Took Less than 15 Mintues

What follows is a story of the various screens that show you just how easy it was to register their program with Google Places.

We have released an enhancement to the Discussions feature in MemberHub. It has been redesigned for improved readability and and browsing.

Each hub has its own Discussion Board which acts like a mailing list for the members in that hub. When discussion threads have many messages that have been sent via email, the old design for Discussions was showing all the previous text in each message and to parse all the messages in a thread you had to click on each message. Furthermore, the listing of Discussions in the hub wasn’t a view of discussion threads, but rather a list of messages/replies with the latest reply to any given Discussion at the top.

1. It was difficult to see the current discussion threads.
2. It was difficult to see which discussion threads had more activity.
3. It was difficult to parse an entire discussion.

To alleviate these concerns we redesigned the Discussions views.

With the design:

1. The Discussions listing now shows a list of discussion threads, rather than the latest message of any given discussion.
2. Each discussion thread shows the total count of messages in that thread.
3. The discussion thread at the top have the latest activity.
4. When you actually view a Discussion you see one view with all the messages in the thread.
5. Each message hides “previous text” so you only see the reply part of the message.

Login, check it out, and let us know what you think in the comments below!