New Year... Newsletter Time

How often do you communicate home to families, just to share news from your classroom or aspects of your curriculum? I don't do this nearly enough, though I'm not sure why. It's certainly good practice, and our elementary teachers do a great job of connecting weekly. So, since it's a new year it's a good time to look at some ways to make more (or more significant) connections with families.

Last year, I used an online digital newsletter format from Smore.com. I liked the ease of creating layouts and adding content. It was super simple to use and creates a sharp-looking product without a ton of effort. I've used it with students, too, to lend a "digital publishing" flavor to a more traditional brochure-type project (this one happened to be about NYS landscape regions for Earth Science). You can email your flyer (limited to 200 emails monthly) or embed it into a blog or website.



What I don't like about Smore is that you are limited to saving 5 flyers with a free account. You can always just alter and re-send an old flyer, but it's nice to be able to store your old creations to come back to. This makes it a bit prohibitive when using it for student projects, as well.

This year, I decided to use newsletter time as an opportunity to try out a new app that I downloaded but have not had the chance to use: Adobe Slate. The app is available on multiple platforms and as a website as well. Adobe Slate allows you to create a newsletter that takes on the form of a photo story. Since it is so intuitive to use and can be accessed across platforms, I think it could be a powerful publishing tool for students to use. It requires signing up for a free Adobe account (don't let students connect via Facebook!) but does not limit the number of newsletters. The fact that it syncs projects between your device and the website made it particularly easy for me to insert photos and content, as well as edit from multiple locations. Like Smore, Slate allows for dissemination via embedding, sharing a link or emailing directly. Emailing opens your default inbox so if you already have an email group set up it's a snap to send it to families.



I'm procrastinating, so this year's newsletter is not quite done. I need to finish a few classes and add the resource links that made last year's more powerful and useful for families. I will say that I think the Slate layout is going to look pretty nifty, but I'm not sure that it's all that necessary for a newsletter. Next time I need to pay more attention to photo-documenting cool experiences in class so that I have better pictures to use.

The benefit (and potential classroom application) to Slate is that I could see myself using it to make tutorials for my students. I appreciate those teachers who have flipped classrooms and make videos, but it's not something I ever see myself doing. I have, however, made documents for students in the past that instruct them in some sort of "how-to" (here's a recent example about how to join a Quizlet class).  I frequently use screenshots or labeled photos (even my own photos of class handouts that I can then digitally label). Anything that I could put in a video, I could put in Slate. There are some great examples of how others are using Slate right on their website (including several that would be useful for educators).

How do you communicate and connect with families? How often? Have you explored any neat digital options? More importantly, do you have any tips about making sure that newsletters actually get read?