Chapter 1 - What Will Students Learn?

Chapter 1 is all about software to use for setting objectives.
My favorite was the electronic newsletter for the parents. It sounds like a wonderful idea - cutting out so many steps in the printing, folding, and sorting process of the hard copy way of doing things. Plus, in the example the newsletter was sent directly to the parents so the school didn't have to rely on the students being responsible for the delivery or using money for stamps. I wonder if my school could do this. How would we get the addresses for all of those e-mails? Is there any way we could capture them off Parent Connect? I often wished I had my students' e-mails too to send them homework or project deadline reminders. I do understand that not 100% of my students or their parents have e-mail, but I expect more than half of them do. Sometimes I call my absent students during the class they are absent from. When the other students see me do this they often give me their cell phone numbers so if they are ever absent they would like for me to call them directly. So, I probably could text my students class news and reminders, but I don't know how to send a mass text. The other thing about the example electronic newsletter was that it included the learning objectives for the month. I really liked that idea. I imagine that parents are more likely to help their elementary students with their homework than those some parents are likely to help their high school students. Even with that as my premise, it's still important to give that information, to let everybody know what's going on with their child's education. So, yes, a newsletter for the parents from the high school that included the objectives from the classes would be a good idea. A teacher could still have her own web page but the whole school periodically e-mailing out a newsletter would really be a nice gesture of communication.
This chapter also suggested a teacher blog as a way of communicating with students. I did look at the teacher blogs that were included in the chapter. I do like the idea of blogging for my students but, just like poor Ms. C's blog from the chapter, I don't think my students would visit it. I often wished I had a place on-line to post certain things for my students and their parents to easily access, things such as - class objectives and expectations, a class syllabus, test outlines, and project rubrics. Since I'm already using Eduphoria for my lesson plans, I wonder if that could be accessed by parents and students. Otherwise it would be repetitive for me to post with the district on Eduphoria and then the post the some information on a classroom web site or blog.

The Survey Monkey does seem like a useful tool to find out what the students already know and what they are interested in learning about. I do like the KWHL (what I KNOW, what I WANT to learn, HOW I will learn it, and what I LEARNED) tool. When I used this before I had to help the class brainstorm the "what I Know" part and the "what I Want to learn". But with enough help on those two parts I do think my students could use this as an organizational tool for their projects in my class. Using Inspiration for this will allow them to easily put it in presentation form to share with the other students.