Getting Parents Involved: The Technology Breakfast

When I went 1:1 with no textbook last year, the students were generally on board and excited but I often faced resistance from parents. The major concerns were about the technology requirements that I was asking of students and how students were supposed to study without textbooks. Generally, I found a lot of parents had no idea what I was talking about when it came to Google Documents, the cloud, blogging, etc...

To overcome some of those issues I decided to organize a technology breakfast for parents in which we invited them in on a Saturday morning. We gave them a continental breakfast and did mini-sessions on how we are using technology in the classroom and how they could use it to support their kids. I made it collaborative for anyone on the staff who wanted to present and limited each session to 15 minutes. I just finished wrapping up our second annual breakfast this morning and had about 50 parents sign up. Parents were very excited and learned a lot. Several kept saying that it should be mandatory for all parents to attend because it was so enlightening and important.

The breakfast has had 3 major impacts:

• The most important impact of course is that parents are now informed about what we are doing and can support their kids.
• We now have involved parents who are championing the case for instructional technology and have become outspoken supporters of teachers.
• Colleagues who are apprehensive about or against using technology have been influenced to step out of their comfort zones to incorporate more of it. 

In the future, I would like to continue to expand it and get students involved and reporting on how it has impacted them.