Classroom Communication
How to get involved as parents
Technology uses for Fifth Grade
Dear Parents,
I have decided to put together a newsletter to inform you of all the ways you can get involved in your child's progress. As technology in the world has progressed, it is very important for everyone to keep up to date and informed. I know it seems absurd that technology can play such a huge role in a classroom setting for fifth grade students. However, with students using twitter, pinterest, wordpress and many more apps, I feel it is important to share with all of you how you can stay connected with what we are doing. In this newsletter I will be describing some of the apps that will be used.
Let VolunteerSpot help you out
VolunteerSpot is one of the apps that we will be using. This is a great app to help the parents stay informed and engaged with all the activities going on. It can be a hassle for everyone when it comes to signing up for events, but this app will allow parents to sign up for events and time slots, via email, that best fits your schedule. Yes, this takes away from the old fashion paper sign up! This app will also be used to help relay all of the deadlines that students have such as a huge project due, magazine sales due, or what foods to bring for functions. It also has a calendar on it that sends out reminders for everyone that has committed to an event. Fifth graders easily forget to bring in their homework or to remind parents of something coming up, but this app will be tremendously helping all of us out!
Think Binder will save you time
This year I will be introducing a new app to my students. They will be using Think Binder since fifth grade is when they really start to work on more detailed group projects and class papers. This is a website where students will create online study groups with the members in their groups. They can upload files, links and even live chat with each other. This will be extremely helpful for parents because it now takes away the stress of having to arrange schedules for your child to meet another's to work on a project. I believe that this app will help not only parents, but also be very good for students. It will help them become more engaged in their project or paper because they can sit at home and work from a computer.
Edmodo saves the day
By this age students in fifth grade most likely have a cell phone. I have decided that this year we will be using Edmodo to make succeed in class. Edmodo is an app that has several key features in which we will use. It has a place where they can go and study with fellow students, which can be done from the comfort of their own house. So, now they do not have an excuse when they say that they cannot study because they do not have a study buddy! This app will also be where I can upload educational vidoes over the material that we discuss each day. They can go back and view these as many times as they want to help them better understand something when they are outside of school. Another cool feature of this app is the library section. Here they can work on their homework and if they stumble across a section that they are confused about, they can just live chat me with questions. This app as a whole has some really cool features that will help your child with questions and activities when they are outside of school.
I hope that this newsletter helped inform you about all of the technological advances we will be making in the fifth grade classroom this year! If you have any questions at all about any of the apps that we will be using or questions about anything at all please do not hesitate to ask! You can use VolunteerSpot to set up a time to meet with me:) Thank you again for allowing me the opportunity to teach you child this year, and I look forward to working with him/her! Can't wait for the great upcoming school year!
Thank you,
Ms. Bailey Ponder