Digital Citizenship and Parent Engagement @scdsb_schools @cmvsocialmedia

I have been part of a collaborative effort to bring Chris Vollum to speak about Digital Citizenship with students and parents as part of a Parent Engagement grant. He was an engaging speaker with many practical ideas and examples too help students and parents to leverage digital formats effectively.  We hoped that this presentation will be a start to getting parents more connected with their children's online presence.  I learned a lot by being part of the committee. The committee consisted of two instructional resource teachers, a special education consultant and the school district's communications team.

The first thing I learned about our school district is that they have an amazing communication team who is professional and willing to help us connect positively with our community. The media professionals at my school board run the twitter feed update other social media formats and help us to produce a single brand for our district.  They updated their internet safety and digital citizenship link on the parent portal because they were part of this project.  As a result we now have up to date information created for parents and for future parent meetings around digital citizenship.

The second thing I learned was that I enjoyed connecting students to authentic tasks.  I had the chance to network with students and teachers in two high schools and they helped to promote the event. Although many of the students did not attend the speaker's presentation our discussions were useful to them as they asked great questions.
Here are some of their questions:
How do I buy my own domain?
How might I improve on my footprint?
What's the best social media format for me if I want to go into sales?
I enjoyed interacting with students and I felt that they had many great ideas to share.

Finally I am still puzzled as to how to truly engage parents.
We used word of mouth, Syneregyse voice mail calls, posters, face-to-face presentations by students and several links on Twitter and Facebook and the board website to promote the event.  We created a Google Hangout link on YouTube so parents could watch the presentation from home.  Based on the analytics, very few chose to do so.

It was disappointing that we had a low turn out given the time, effort and funds that were spent to attract parents to the session. The quality of Chris Vollum's presentation was excellent.

I still have the following questions:
How do we support parents when we don't see a large participation rate?
Parents need to make sure that their child is the same online as offline.  They don't need to be tech experts; they do need to insist on good character.  Teens' online life is their real life and it will follow them good or bad where ever they hope to go.
How can we make sure parents are getting the message we send them?
What social media model should we use to get our messages out??

I know this question has baffled many.  I don't think it is because parents don't want to know but they aren't aware of the support that is available.  I wish I could find a way to make more meaningful connections with parents to develop a stronger partnership about their children's learning.