Communications plan development and implementation

Communications Plan

In developing a communications plan for my first year of teaching, the most important consideration is how to create platforms, processes and workflows that allow students, parents, trusted members of the local community to collaborate together. With the objective of creating a highly collaborative platform, this communications plan is multifaceted yet grounded in high levels of security and confidentiality all who participate. The overarching goal of giving students every opportunity possible to excel in their educational pursuits is the cornerstone of the combining of communications channels in this proposal. It is also imperative that students, parents, community and the global community appreciate the context of the learning objectives and results in the context of the global community. To facilitate this, recommendations for specific child-safe websites on the Internet will be provided and downloadable safe-surfing software and Web browsers will be offered free over the proposed class website and collaboration portal. Safe access to the global community will also be the goal of the entire communications plan and portal.

Foundation of Communications Plan: Class Website and Collaboration Portal

The use of Web-based, password protected and secured portals is becoming commonplace in elementary, junior high and high schools to ensure accuracy of academic performance, attendance reporting to parents, and the selection of programs to participate in (Roduta, Richards, 2006). Portals have also become the central collaboration platform for ensuring parents and teachers have a chance to interact and communicate with regard to students' performance over time (Lamb, 2007). Portals that enable the highest level of collaboration and therefore generate the most effective results are those that involve roles for the student, teacher, and parent (Lamb, 2007). To enable greater levels of collaboration, the proposed portal will have an interactive discussion area where each parent will have their own password-encrypted area where they can converse with the teacher. Each of these instructor-based sessions will be independent of the next; there will be no comparable or shared sessions between parents. This assures total confidentiality and will replicate what parent-teacher conferences are meant to do in person. Realizing that teachers have more time demands on them than ever before and parents do as well, this 24/7 virtual teacher conference area will be useful to ensuring each parent has a chance to voice their concerns and questions about their students. Likewise, it will also give the teacher the opportunity to highlight exceptional academic achievement and also evaluate strategies and techniques for improving students' performance over time on challenging areas.

A second area of the class website and collaboration portal will be a real-time grade scorecard for each student, accessible to each student and parent using their personal login and password. This will serve to provide incentive to increase academic performance over time in areas needing improvement, and also give students pride in their work to date. This also fulfills a fundamental teaching strategy of giving the students an opportunity to attain autonomy, mastery and purpose (Walker, Greene, 2009) in their learning activities. The intent of this real-time grade scorecard is to give students a chance to see how their efforts in the short-run impact their academic performance over the long-run. The scorecard will therefore be used as a motivation strategy in addition to a communications one.

The website will feature artwork, projects, and exceptional accomplishments by the students so they have the opportunity to see purpose and mastery of their work. Students will also be able to create their own pages on the website, only listing their in-class nickname or first name only for security reasons, and will be able to decorate it any way they wish. In doing this, they will also gain mastery over basic website design tools and techniques. In addition to promoting mastery of their own pages and the use of fundamental Web page editing tools, the students will also have the autonomy within limits to express themselves creatively. It is hoped that combining mastery and purpose the students will be motivated to excel even more academically to showcase their accomplishments online. Security in the form of first names only, even nicknames, and no actual photographs of the children themselves will be enforced to protect their identity and confidentiality.

A third channel of the communications plan will be e-mail. This channel will be first used to broadcast updates to the grade scorecards and also alert both parents and teachers of entries on the virtual parent teacher conference area of the portal. New activity updates will also be broadcast using e-mail as well. One-on-one conversations will be scheduled through e-mail but completed on the secured area of the portal itself for privacy.