Twitter for the Second Grade Classroom??!!

Hello Blog Friends.... I'm back from a quick vacation to Disney the happiest place on earth....when you don't factor in the 100+ degree heat.

I came back to great news 21 followers! Yippee!!

However no one has linked up to my link party so, I'm going to revise and repost it later.

As for today's post it comes from one of my favorite companies, Responsive Classroom.

First things first hit up the Responsive Classroom website and sign up for the email newsletter in the lower right hand corner. It's awesome while typing this post I found 2 more things I want to look into, to help create community in my classroom.

Next check out the August Newsletter then check out these two articles that I'm blogging about today Communicating With Parents and What's One Way You Communicate with Parents?

The last article I found really interesting especially because one teacher is from my home state of Connecticut. The teacher's name is Tracy Mercier and she teaches 3rd grade. She has a lot of great technical resources, but as you'll read in this article she uses Twitter to communicate with parents about the day to day going on in the classroom.

You can check out her classroom twitter page here. She also has a personal page geared towards educators, not parents and students.

I really liked this idea, because...

1. Every year is the year I'm going to be on top of the parent news letter. Strong through December, flash to June where I haven't published a newsletter in 6 months.

2. I collect all parent emails in my beginning of the year letter/survey, but don't feel that we read "Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel" and made connections to working through a tricky problem warrants an email. I see myself, saying "Junk Mail" or not more emails!

3. Twitter constantly archives, so if I tweet 2 or 3 times during a day, a parent can quickly scan all of them and see what's been going on.

4. I do closing meeting everyday. 3 things we learned, 2 things that went well and 1 thing to work on for next time. I'm sure by using the SmartBoard I could easily incorporate tweeting into our end of the day activities...which was the hang up with #1.

So here is my question to you....

How do you communicate with parents?

Do you think Twitter could be a useful means for communication?

**Also note I added a Twitter button to the top left of my blog page. I've only got one tweet so far, but it's a start... You can check out my twitter page here.