If I could get them to use it, sure. Some teachers will, some you will have to wait until they are retired or dead to get a tweet from that class. DD still has teachers that do not even use email...

Carole

PPP - my biggest concern with this is requesting teachers to do anything MORE.  Plus I know many parents that do not use email/computers regularly enough for this to be effective.  Can you imagine? 

#2's teacher sends at least a weekly email, updates her school page often, and responds to my emails fairly quickly.  It's been a really good tool for us.  If one of our teachers wished to use this technology I'd embrace it.

Now I'd love to find a way to reduce those 6000 forms that you have to fill out at the beginning of the year.

I would rather (as a future teacher) set up everyone's email on my outlook express and send an email with a read receipt so that I know which parents actually bothered to read it.  However, since I would like to work in the inner city or with the disadvantaged, I know my students and families would probably not have computer access.  I also know a teacher in DPS who had to fight just to get an over head projector, let alone have a projector to do power point or anything interactive and I know her students didn't have a computer at home.

As a teacher, I agree with MLN.  This year I had a senior who did not have a computer in her home, nor did she carry a cell phone.  Yes, she was the odd man out, but, as the weakest link, she, not the others, is the one to be catered to.  While teachers can be forced, through threats against their job, to embrace technology, no manner of threat will get all of the parents on board. 

My school has used PowerSchool for a number of years now and there are still parents who have never been on PowerSchool to check their child's progress.  Yes, the kids have.  And they are the first to tell me if I made a mistake, but parents, no. 

I, personally, would prefer email, and have used email to communicate effectively with the parents of my students.  But with my Catechism class last year, none of whom did I have an email address, I resorted to good old snail mail to communicate with parents.  Still there were some who just never got the message, or maybe it was because they just didn't care. 

Dinosaur teachers are not the crux of the problem, delinquent parents are. 

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.

I think Twitter would be a great tool to use.  Responding to individual emails takes a ton of my time. Almost all my parents have cell phones, maybe not internet at home, and twitter comes on your cellphone.

I think it would be time saving and cool. I type very quickly and could send out a twitter in about a minute or less. I post some stuff to our Zangle gradebook online but parents need a password and internet access to look at the online gradebook (I post due dates of certain things in a bb page).

Sorry, I love email but am not into Twitter. I don't actually even know what it is and so far, don't care to either. I find it very useful when teachers use email and have web pages but even that isn't a huge requirement for me for communication. And yes, I am one of the organized parents who normally does check the backpack, read the newsletter and put important dates on my calendar on the day the newsletter comes home. I also either check my kids' backpacks or, with the oldest, do a check in after school where he empties the backpack and hands me all the flyers, notes, etc. that come home. This doesn't always work out the way I like it to but often enough it does. If our school district started using Twitter as an important communications tool then I would definitely learn all about it and use it but for now, I don't feel like I'm missing anything without it.

All the things I have heard about Twitter has caused me to conclude that it is silly.   Who really cares what some celebrity is doing every single minute of the day? 

But if our principal decided that Twitter was the way he wanted us to communicate with parents, then I would have to use it. 

I just wish all parents would use the tools that are available to them now.  

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.

As a teacher, I've already started experimenting with it in the last couple of months. 

Since I started late in the school year, so far, I don't have many parent followers, but I find that it's a lot easier sending out reminders over Twitter than updating a web page every so often.

My game plan for next year will be to use email for individual parent/teacher communication and Twitter for "mass updates".

As a former PR person for a school District I think that things like Twitter are great.  Also listservs and email has made reminders more accessible.  The school district that I used to work for does "tweet" but it is in addition to other forms of communication. I agree that while many have computers I worked in a pretty afluent district and it was estimated that 30% of the parents had no access to email or a computer on a regular basis.  I also believe that as the population of parents and teachers gets younger new forms of communication will become more and more popular.

Lisa Holmes
Dove Chocolate Discoveries
Enjoy the Sweet Life!

Ask me about hosting a chocolate party, and getting free chocolate or join my team.
Check out: www.dove-chocolate-discoveries.com/lisaholmes

i'd love a twitter, personally
our school has the teachers put the assignments in the same thing they use for grading, though, so any computer-connected parent can go online and check grades and also see what assignments were assigned if so inclined.
our district has a listserv that you can sign-up for, and announcements are great that way, although I wish they'd also log them on the district website somewhere so there's a historical log so you don't have to keep all those emails
the nice thing about twitter is I can follow it on my Blackberry (shhhh, dont tell PNut....)

"Stereotypes about women's domestic roles are reinforced by parallel stereotypes presuming a lack of domestic responsibilities for men. ... These mutually reinforcing stereotypes created a self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination." 
Chief Justice William Renquist 
Nevada Dep't of Human Resources v. Hibbs, 538 US 721, 736 (2003)
.