The Power of Positive Messaging

As previously posted, our blogs for this month are focusing on the Communication aspect of P21's 4 Cs. This week’s tip is about using Schoology and other tools to help increase positive communication in your classroom. As teachers, we all know the importance of ongoing communication with parents. The problem is that we often get into the habit of only letting parents know when their students are misbehaving or when there is a problem or concern. This leads to regular communication with only a small handful of parents, and those tough phone calls always seem to turn into 20 minute conversations.

Well here enters the Power of Positive Messaging. When teachers take the time to send positive messages to parents, they are building positive relationships with those parents as well as with students. Therefore, behavior issues start to decline, and when issues do come up, the parents are more likely to work with the teacher to help solve the problem.  

So let’s get to easy ways to send those messages. There are many tools out there that can help you, but today the main focus will be on building a positive community within Schoology. Schoology makes it easy for teachers to communicate with both students and parents through their messaging tool. To send a positive message to one of your students or the parents of one of your students, simply go to your Schoology course, click on Members, and click the wheel to the right of the student. There you will see the option to send a message, which will go to the student, or Message Parents, which will send an email to the parent(s) of the student.

While students are not given access to message each other in Schoology, they can message their teachers. This feature could be used for students to send positive messages to you about other students in class, which can provide you even more positive feedback for your messages to parents. 

Posting positive Schoology updates can also help create positive relationships with parents and students. You can post about your entire class, or by using first names if you feel comfortable with that. Maybe give a shout-out to some of your students each day or week for something they accomplished. 

Media Albums in Schoology can be used to show off positive behaviors and classwork as well. Simply use your phone to take and post pictures of kids doing great things, add a quick caption, and those can be seen by all of the members of your course and their parents. To learn more about Schoology's Media Albums, click here. 

Another great tool for positive parent communication is Class Dojo. If you aren't familiar with what Class Dojo can do for you, check out our post from last August about it by clicking here. 

The next time you have to make that tough phone call to a parent, take time to reflect about what the Power of Positive Messaging could do to help you build positive relationships with your students and parents in the future. Carve out a little time in your calendar each day, or even each week to give it a try and see what happens from there. 

Tuesday Tech Tip: 10 Great Ways to Use Schoology’s Media Albums With Your Class(es) or School

We love the media albums feature in Schoology.  Media albums are simple to create and use, but can be so powerful. Did you know that you can crop pictures in the album, rotate and re-order the pictures, and tag people in them? You can also decide if you want to enable comments, and if you want your students to be able post pictures and videos in the album. 

Remember, Schoology is password protected, so you can enjoy posting pictures here without them being publicly shared. However, if your course or group is public, your media album can also be made public. To learn how to create a media album, see Schoology's video directions by clicking here.  

Here is a screen capture of what a media album looks like, including some pictures and video:

If you're ready for ideas on how to incorporate media albums with your class or school, find 10 great ones below.

1, Show and Tell: Kids love to show off things that are too big to bring to school, or alive, or that they ate for dinner last night. They also want to show everyone things they (or their cats) do at home. Have them post those pictures and videos to your Schoology Show and Tell Media Album.
2. Vacation Pictures: Create a vacation media album and have your students post pictures and captions of where they are - in front of the Eiffel Tower, perhaps? The Statue of Liberty? A battlefield from the Civil War? Pull your students' pictures into your lessons when your class learns about those locations in history or current events, or even science. Other ideas: Have the student be "Teacher for the Day," teaching other students about where they went or add everyone's pictures to Google’s My Maps to document places the class has been.
3. Science Experiments: Have groups of students document the phases of an experiment in media albums with captions.  They can also add predictions or results of the experiments using the comments feature.
4. Field Trips: Bring your students’ parents with you (virtually) on your next field trip. You and your students can take pictures and post them to the media album so parents can experience the trip while you do.
5. School Events: Take pictures during poetry slams, the science fair, Veteran’s Day events, etc. to document exciting things happening at your school or in your class.
6. Athletics and Activities: Capture dances, plays, musicals, and sporting events after school.
7. Virtual Art Gallery: Have students upload photos of their artwork into a media album for others to comment on or just peruse.
8. Vocabulary Sets: For primary students, try having students take pictures of items that start with a certain letter. For foreign language classes, have students take pictures and label them in the caption with the word (or phrase) in the language they are learning.
9. P.E. Class: Take photos or videos of students performing an exercise correctly (or incorrectly) and post them for others to see and learn from.
10. Silent Auction: Take photos of items offered in a Silent Auction and post them with description and opening bid as the caption.  Have people comment to bid on the items.

Each item in your media album can be customized. Below is a screen cap of the options (click the green star icons to learn more about the features available).

We hope you will now have some new ideas for using Schoology's media albums. How will you use them with your class(es) or school?