Reach Your Most Important Parent Engagement Goals in 2018

We’re coming to an end of a truly amazing year. We had an opportunity to talk to hundreds of teachers throughout the year and learn what are the biggest “game-changers” when it comes to parents engagement. Not surprisingly, we heard some of the same goals and hopes coming up again and again:

• eliminating language barriers
• reaching offline parents
• sending a weekly newsletter without spending hours
• improving conference attendance…

… do these sound familiar? We bet that you’ve found at least one area you’d like to work on next year.

Trying to “do it all” can be overwhelming, but we all have that one challenge we’d finally want to overcome next year. We have countless examples of teachers who reached their most important parent engagement goals with ClassTag. Next year it could be you! Here’s how you can learn from their success and resolve the most common parent communication problems.

Which of these goals will you focus on in the New Year?

1. Eliminating Language Barriers

For multicultural classrooms, timely and effective communication with non-English-speaking-parents is always a concern. This is why automated translation is one of the teachers’ favorite ClassTag features.

Parents invited to ClassTag start receiving all communications in their preferred language, including invitations, announcements, conversations, weekly newsletters – across all channels – email, SMS or using web and apps. This means all parents can be included in the school life and teachers no longer need to spend countless hours translating content.

Learn how it works in under 2 minutes:

“I’m excited to finally keep everyone in the loop using just one system,” says Leah, a 1st grade teacher from Missouri. Join Leah and start communicating with parents in over 50 languages instantly!

2. Reaching Offline Parents

You might aspire to get every parent connected using digital tools, but the truth is, parents’ usage of various tools remains unsatisfactory. Many communities, particularly in Title 1 schools still have limited access to a cell phone or computer.

ClassTag is the only application addressing the real reasons behind the lack of engagement from the ground up, bridging the gap between online and offline communications.

One of ClassTag users, Danielle explained:

“My main challenge was to reach all parents and get them to respond. Too often teachers engage the same families over and over, but those that need this connection the most seem to be missing out. ClassTag understood the very heart of the issue and giving me the opportunity to confidently reach all families and print out the personalized newsletters and announcements for parents who aren’t online or who don’t regularly read their emails.”

With ClassTag, you can see exactly who didn’t read the message and needs a paper copy of the announcement or newsletter. You can also print it out directly from the application:

3. Sending a weekly newsletter (without spending hours every week)

We designed The Weekly Summary with an aim to replace labor-intensive paper newsletters. Weekly summary is sent as an email or as SMS with a link to view a personalized copy according to parents’ notification preferences. As a teacher, you can add a custom message or just sit back, knowing that ClassTag keeps parents in the loop. You can also choose the time and day when the summary is sent.

Renee, a fourth grade teacher from Idaho says:

“My favorite aspect of ClassTag is the automated Weekly Update. I know my parents will receive a weekly message and any event reminders without lifting a finger. No more working on Sunday to create a lengthy email many parents aren’t reading.”

Read Renee’s story >>

https://blog.classtag.com/classtag-parent-engagement-system/

 4. Improving parent-teacher conference attendance

Perhaps, as many teachers, you primarily use a paper format for communication and coordination of parent teacher conferences. The challenge? The forms that are sent home are often misplaced resulting in delayed communication. The challenges of using paper format also include coordination of sibling conferences. This makes the sign-up process stressful because many students have siblings in several different grade levels.

Here’s how Tara, a 4th grade teacher from Indiana transformed parent-teacher conferences with ClassTag:

“ClassTag allowed me to effectively streamline conference times, quickly provide information to other teachers with siblings, and change times slots as needed. Furthermore, I did not have to sift through papers and organize forms saving me hours of time. I had around 90 % of parents attend conferences and 10% of parents had phone conferences or re-scheduled.”

Read Tara’s story >>

https://blog.classtag.com/transform-parent-teacher-conferences/

Curious how to set up your parent teacher conference on ClassTag? It really is that easy! Watch the video of follow this step-by-step guide.

What’s your number one parent engagement goal for 2018? Let us know and we’ll be happy to help! Simply log in to ClassTag and message our helpful team for insight and guidance. We’ll do our best to work with you to can engage every parent in 2018.