Hi
@Bonnie Blagojevic and
@Karen Wilson,
I just wanted to chime in on this! Seesaw and some of the other free tools for family communication have drawbacks as compared to the paid products like Storypark. First, the free products only allow a teacher to communicate with the families of the children in his or her class. which is a drawback because program leaders and administrators can't oversee the communication for all of the classes in a program or in a multisite program. Seesaw is only for "communication," which means the functionality is limited to posting messages and related media, whereas Storypark is a pedagogical documentation tool that allows sharing between teachers, family, extended family, and specialists... everyone in the child's ecosystem, and it allows parents to initiate documentation to the child's ecosytem. The tool is designed to prompt
Learning Stories, or observations, as well as include media. Some programs like
@Michael Knuckey's may use it for family communication as well as rich documentation to inform their work as educators. which includes rich insights from families as well. It also allows administrators to have insight and generate reports about the documentation for all the classes and children in the center. I recently presented at the NAEYC Annual Conference about how to select family communication and program management systems. You can access the slides and handouts, including a robust list of all of the products in these two classes of products at
https://engagestrat.com/ece-software . I hope this is helpful!
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Fran Simon, M.Ed.
Engagement Strategies, LLC
Early Childhood Investigations Webinars
Early Childhood Investigations Consultants Directory
Washington, DC Metro
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Original Message:
Sent: 12-08-2019 08:15 AM
From: Bonnie Blagojevic
Subject: Family Communication
Hello Karen,
Some of the preschool teachers I have collaborated with in Maine use Seesaw to communicate regularly with families. Efforts to involve families/some of the ways they are using it were written up in NAEYC's TYC magazine (Aug/Sept 2019 issue) Developing Family Partnerships Using New Communication Tools. Seesaw is free, easy to use, and with features such as the ability to organize each child's work, easily take, draw on photos, add audio or video to share with parents, translation support, etc has been a very helpful way to communicate with families.
There have been a few other discussions on HELLO about this topic in the past that might prove useful.
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Bonnie Blagojevic
Morningtown Consulting
Orono ME
Original Message:
Sent: 12-06-2019 11:03 AM
From: Karen Wilson
Subject: Family Communication
Hello all,
Looking for some input on how schools are currently communicating with families. Our classrooms are using a weekly newsletter, as well as classroom Instagram accounts. From the office, they are also receiving a school newsletter. I know there is no pleasing everyone, but was just looking for information on how other schools are best communicating with their families.
Thank you for your time!
Karen
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Karen Wilson
Education Coordinator
Noroton Presbyterian Nursery School
Darien CT
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