Gathering feedback and information

Getting responses from parents & teachers over the internet is proving too be tough. I'm not surprised.. Our pitch was 1/2 hearted.. I'm weighing up the option of going down to the school at 3:30 on some days to meet the parents and talk face to face to really find out what issues surrounding ICT they feel passionate about.

Facebook privacy and user issues!

I had a few chats with some of the staff members at Wilsden today about privacy and data protection. Basically they are scared that if they add wilsden primary as a friend then parents will be able to message them or get in touch.

This may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing, it's not for me to judge but the simple fact is that the facebook account is one of many methods we can use to aggregate data and has proved to be initially successful.

We currently have our facebook page open to the world to see but it appears that anyone can see who are friends(parents) are, this is a problem and is being addressed.

No doubt in my mind that as long as we aggregate data from the blog to facebook using the notes/rss feed then facebook has been a positive attribute at engaging parents.

Another decisions that has been made is that only friends who are actual parents will be accepted as friends, I personally disagree with this however this is required due to privacy/security reasons and will be policed internally by a staff member on a weekly basis.

One of the parents has offered to spend some time training this staff member.

A big problem we are facing is that of explaining to staff members that by putting something onto say, the blog, will make it's way onto facebook and that they don't need to double post or even to do anything on facebook other than to accept people to see what has been posted..

Facebook user update

Tuesday - We are now up to 36 friends on facebook :) That's still less than 10% of the parents though so please spread the message. I will ask for the school to send out another notice about the facebook page on Friday to see if we can get some more followers.

Facebook user update

Now up to 11 followers (Sunday AM)

Didn't expect any pupils to be following the school but it appears 1 of 11 is a pupil!

Newsletter response

Up to 8 parents on facebook so far! Paper newsletter went out yesterday (Friday).. Will update here on Monday

Our facebook test

During the last 2 parents evening I went to I asked 90 parents to add the school as a friend on facebook.

I made one mistake and said to search for wilsden primary school, infact they needed to search for wilsden primary..

Anyway, 3 parents found us so that's 1 in 30.

On Friday a newsletter is going out with the direct address http://facebook.com/wilsdenprimary for parents to add the school a friend.

It will also be interesting to see if any teachers add the school as a friend.

It will be especially interesting to see which I get a overall higher % of, parents or teachers..

Year 3 and 6 open day

I just finished an open day. The children in year 3 were given their toshiba laptops. Wilsden has an ownership model and most of the questions I was asked were quite sensible.

I asked parents of year 3 and 6 to search for Wilsden Primary School on facebook and to add us as a friend so I will await to see the results of that. My estimate is that 5 or so parents will, my logic is that if I can get enough parents on then I can get a network of parents together to provide quality feedback.

Here are some of the questions that were asked today:

• Can a parent send email to child's email address?
• Can parents send emails to teachers?
• Can your child keep the laptop when they leave year 6?
• Will we have more idea of what children are covering in lessons on say a weekly basis on each subject?
• Is non school software allowed on the netbooks?
• How will back ups work? What if the device is lost?

For the record, I took pictures of these questions on my HTC hero but the focus is so bad I can't even read them.

Next stop is answering these questions on the school blog which is available at http://wilsden.primaryblogger.co.uk

One thing I did find interesting is that parents put their mobile # and name on the post stick note for everyone to see, I guess they expect that the school would call them and answer their query instead of publicly answering it. Maybe they got asked to and I was day dreaming!