Read all about it! Get your Parent Newsletter.

This was probably the most exciting group project we did.  A parent newsletter is something that every teachers will have to make or do when they are teaching.  This is not your regular newsletter, it is an interactive one which makes it even better.

Newsletters are a great way for teachers and parents to stay connected.  I think the key to a great school year is communication between parents, teachers, and administrators.  By posting your newsletter on a website or a wiki page your parents will always know what is going on in your classroom.  This way communication  can take place before the event happens and everything is post for all to see.  This way the teacher is showing her schedule before and she/he is not surprising anyone.  By the teacher and parents having a good line of communication there will be no surprises for either side.

I will definitely be communicating with my students parents by newsletters on my school website.  This is a great idea.  My one sons teacher did all of his announcements, posting of homework, party notices, and any other important information that we need to know about on his page of the school website.  He told us in the beginning of the year and it worked out great.  If he need to talk to us he would e-mail or we e-mailed him and he got back to us within hours.  I loved the way he set up his way of communicating to the parents and this would be the way I would do it in my classroom.

In our newsletter we talked about new assessment techniques that we feel would be a good way to assess students besides the old standby, pencil and paper.  We like several different ideas but the ones we liked the best were; blogger, podcasts, webquests, Avatars, and Gloster.  Each one of these on-line assessments are interactive and fun for the students to do.  As a group we decided to use Gloster to do our newsletter, because it had some great designs, a better selection of layouts, and graphics (as you can see above). 

We all really liked doing this project together.  As always we, K2TLP, work great together and all get along really well, which helps in collaboration situations.   Kim did a great job pulling it all together and adding the final touches at the end.  I liked our class newsletter so much that I would not change a thing if I had to do it or another one again.  We all put a lot of work into making this letter creative, unique,  and to the point.  Go K2TLP!!!