A recent post by Melinda Miller about her flipped fac­ulty meet­ing helped me reflect on other poten­tial impacts of the flipped class­room model.  She essen­tially took care of what she called the “nuts and bolts” of her meet­ing vir­tu­ally by allow­ing par­tic­i­pants to inde­pen­dently read and review infor­ma­tion and view mul­ti­ple videos.  The idea behind the flipped class­room or fac­ulty meet­ing is to allow for a richer dia­logue in the actual class­room or meet­ing rather than wast­ing time on deliv­ery of basic information.

As a prin­ci­pal, I too tried to take care of basic infor­ma­tion prior to meet­ings through emails or other forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  How­ever when I reflect back, I real­ize I didn’t fully embrace tech­nol­ogy in all pos­si­ble ways.  As I read Melinda’s post, I began to think about the pow­er­ful ways tech­nol­ogy can pro­vide the oppor­tu­nity for flipped com­mu­ni­ca­tion with other stake­hold­ers.  Research has shown the ben­e­fits of effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion with par­ents. Have you and your school embraced tech­nol­ogy to com­mu­ni­cate in new and more effec­tive ways?  Here are three ways to use tech­nol­ogy to increase par­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  The sug­ges­tions may stray a bit from what many peo­ple views as the flipped model that sim­ply presents infor­ma­tion in basic ways.

1)  Cre­ate a YouTube chan­nel with mul­ti­ple purposes.

• Share gen­eral suc­cesses and chal­lenges with parents.
• Have stu­dents cre­ate videos or screen­casts review­ing content.
• Cre­ate videos that address com­mon ques­tions or con­cerns that arise through­out the year.

2)  Cre­ate a class twit­ter account to share class­room or school infor­ma­tion.  Have stu­dents take respon­si­bil­ity for the account!

3)  Set-up a flickr account and share images, when appro­pri­ate, of stu­dent work, guest  speak­ers, and even notes from the whiteboard.

Obvi­ously, it is also impor­tant to note that not all par­ents will check these var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion meth­ods just as some par­ents don’t read newslet­ters or let­ters home.  As I wrote this post, I real­ized I moved away from the con­cept of sim­ply shar­ing basic infor­ma­tion vir­tu­ally.  The ideas above, along with many oth­ers, may poten­tially help you to cre­ate “meet­ings” in ways that were not always pos­si­ble.  Whether you are a school admin­is­tra­tor, coun­selor, or teacher, these things may poten­tially allow you to strengthen the com­mu­nity within your class­room or school by embrac­ing the tech­nol­ogy tools that are read­ily avail­able to all.

Nick Sauers