Guest Blogger - Loran Lattes

Reaching All Our Families

Loran Lattes-Teacher-Librarian, Whittier International Elementary

Whittier International Elementary has a wonderfully diverse community. We are an International Baccalaureate, Title 1 school with 25% of students learning English as a second language. While this is something to be celebrated, it also presents some hurdles including parent communication!

The Family Outreach Committee at Whittier came to our Tech Committee with an idea for a collaborative parent night. We knew from a survey that close to 100% of families have at least 1 device at home with Internet access (often a smart phone). However, many parents still did not have an email address registered with us. Together, our committees decided to hold Family Tech Nights. The goals included increasing the use of digital communication, increasing comfort with technology, and increasing parent understanding of our use of technology with students at Whittier.

Family Tech Night

We held our first parent tech night Thursday (Nov. 10). We contacted all families without an email address by phone and took reservations for 15 minute sessions that took place right before a presentation on Internet Safety. Additionally, we decided it was important to have 1:1 help available for our most reluctant users and we had translators available for the languages represented. We worked with six families during our first Family Tech Night.

Inspiring & Bonding

Participating in the tech sessions was inspiring and bonding. On the tech side, during the hour we were "open for business" we set up gmail accounts, sent and received practice email messages, set up accounts to always translate messages, looked at our school and district databases and other resources that can be used at home, and communicated student username and password information, On the community side, we worked together to find solutions, laughed, cursed our technology when things went wrong, laughed some more, made new friends, built trust, played charades at times when translators were busy, listened, spoke, taught, and learned.

Build Community

We plan to hold at least two more Family Tech Nights this school year. We hope to build comfort and skills with our most reluctant users of technology and, in the process, build our community of learners.