We know that keeping parents informed and offering them reassurance is an essential part of the service you provide as a teacher. Research clearly shows that engaged parents lead to better learning outcomes for students overall.
However, we also understand that you want to maintain the in-person connection with parents and not bombard them with information from a third party which they may struggle to understand.
In this article, we will layout our best practice approach to communicating EdPlace progress to parents, which you can then tailor to the specific needs of your families and school.
Referring parents for use at home
If you are utilising a free teacher account, you can refer parents to use EdPlace out of school hours to increase their child's confidence, time for practise and provide greater visibility for them on what their child is doing in the classroom.
Head to the 'Connect parents' tab on the left-hand menu of your teacher dashboard. Here you can track how many parents have connected your school to their parent EdPlace account, how close you are to unlocking new seats, and generate invites for new parents:
There are two super easy ways to invite parents:
- Copying and pasting our sign up link for use in your own communications with parents;
- Send an email directly to the parents you choose with virtually zero work on your part.
For more information on how to refer parents, the benefits and how it helps to increase access for your students in need, please click here to read our article.
Utilising the data from your teacher dashboard
We know that all the information captured and stored on your teacher dashboard is a fantastic resource to facilitate conversations with parents about progress. In particular, we receive regular feedback from our parents that knowing their child's best performing skills and areas where improvement is needed can be particularly interesting. To read more about these analytics, please click here.
Using the PDF report from an EdPlace Assessment may be particularly helpful, as these activities can be used to benchmark the starting levels of students and clearly show the progression they have made during a set period (e.g. a term). To read more about these assessments and how they work, please click here.
Auto-emailed weekly progress reports
When you create student accounts, you have the option of adding a parent's email in the optional field 'Progress Report Email':
You can easily turn this feature ON or OFF for individual students in your 'Manage students' dashboard by checking or unchecking the 'Parent connect' box next to each student's name:
If you add an email here, linked parents will automatically receive a weekly summary report straight into their Inbox! To read more about this report and the information it contains, please click here.
To link a parent’s email address to a student account that has already been set up, you can either go to the 'Manage students' tab in your account and click ‘Edit’ next to the name of the student you would like to add an email for. Or check the box shown in the image above and you will be prompted to add a parent email.
Please ensure that you have sought and obtained permission from parents to share their information before you add any email addresses.
Promoting usage through badges and rewards
At EdPlace, we use badges and rewards to make progress visible and attainable for our student users. Every child will see their progress towards their badges and (if it has been set) a personalised reward clearly in their account, every time they log in:
Website: Apps:
Encouraging parents and children to track, review and celebrate these achievements together is a fantastic way to ensure that the whole family stays engaged, motivated and aware. If a parent have signed up for home access, why not encourage parents to offer a personalised reward, which their child can work towards? To read more about rewards, click here.
We hope that this article has given you all the information you need and plenty of ideas for how you can use EdPlace to strengthen your connection with parents. If you have any ideas for us to add to this article or any follow-up questions, please contact our friendly Customer Support Team via email at help@edplace.com.