Instant Messages

You are a high school teacher. On average, twenty-four students fill each of your six classes of the day. You teach "The Structure of the U.S. Government" to sleepy tenth-graders in the mornings and "The History of Western Europe" to antsy seniors in the afternoons. That's roughly one hundred forty-four students that are in your charge. Those 144 students have, at the very least, 288 parents. And that's just the first half of the year.

So, how do you stay on top of it all? How do you promptly notify parents that their son has missed your class three days in a row? Or that their daughter has achieved the highest grade possible on all four of your pop quizzes?

Many districts are handing teachers the answer. For teachers lucky enough to work for a school that utilizes interactive, online grading books, a huge burden has been lifted.

It all starts with attendance. Instead of old-fashioned methods, like attendance cards, a teacher records absentees into her desktop. The files are instantly shared with the attendance office. In addition, an e-mail is automatically sent to the parents of absent children.

Parents can also keep up with a child's progress by logging in with their password to see grades as well as missing assignments. In some systems, a teacher can even link scans of a student's work, complete with a teacher's comments or corrections, into the grade book for parent's review.

I have even seen systems that allow parents to see a teacher's office hours and request an appointment online.

These same computer programs single-handedly allow teachers to input grades and notify a parent that their child has failed a test by employing automatically generated e-mails. More importantly, the system safeguards teachers from showing preferential treatment or overlooking a troubled student. It also gives teachers the ability to share the responsibility for a child's education with parents by involving them early in a child's struggle with material, instead of after irreversible damage has been done to a GPA.

Check to see if the district that you would like to work for employs this powerful tool. Find your way to the school's website, which is typically the portal through which parents gain access to their child's grades. A link will be provided (often at the bottom of the page) to the online grade book. One of the most popular and widely-used systems is "Edline." Another is "DynaPortal." To get your district to consider using one of these systems, try researching them by looking for "website hosting and portal solution for K12 schools" online.