Enhance Communication Across Your School, District, or Department with Edmodo

Discover how Edmodo can transform communication for everyone in your school community.

Strengthen your community by improving communication

In one of the most cited works in school leadership academia, Robert Marzano posits the paramount importance of communication within schools. With his “21 Responsibilities of the School Leader,” (all of which are shown to have a statistically significant relationship with student achievement), communication features prominently. In fact, given how interwoven it is with most aspects of leadership, communications seems to possibly be the most important responsibility.

Marzano also touches on the importance of communication in “What Works in Schools Translating Research into Action,” with his leveled approach to factors that impact achievement in schools. Here, he suggests that one of the crucial school-level factors is parent and community involvement — specifically that of communication, participation, and governance. Marzano goes on to identify strategies to implement change, and his book series is a seminal read for current and aspiring leaders alike.

The need for effective communication in schools is not new, and is supported by nearly half a century of research. This is not lost on school leaders, who know a major key to building stakeholder support for quality education is effective communication. This involves building a strategic communication plan; managing internal communication; and engaging a community of taxpayers, teachers, and the school board, among others.

Schools can implement a number of different activities to enable better communication, such as providing parents with newsletters. Giving parents the opportunity to respond is also an important part of this communication loop. However, without the right tools, it can be difficult to reach everyone, and this is a challenge school leaders invariably encounter.

Use Edmodo to communicate beyond the classroom

While Edmodo is well-known for its classroom and training capabilities, it’s also a fully-featured stakeholder communications platform. Edmodo allows school leaders at the building and district levels to address different audiences across their network.

A principal can address all the parents at her school. A curriculum director can reach out to all staff across the organization. Teachers and staff can communicate within their buildings. And parents are able to respond to messages sent to them by administrators.

Edmodo features even help school leaders manage school and personal identities by allowing the community message to originate from either the school or the individual.

These messages can all be dispatched from a single unified page on Edmodo: The School Page. You can think of it as a Facebook page, except with the ability to customize to the stakeholder audience (staff, students, and parents), and it’s on the same platform already used for education.

It’s also easy to form staff or teaching groups to share effective strategies, resources, and embedded conversations. Using the format of Edmodo’s groups, virtually any team or department can organize into self-sustaining professional development cohorts. A PD group directory also exists to help curriculum teams and other specialists support a vast training and resource network on Edmodo.

When layered in with Edmodo’s group communication abilities, school features allow for a large amount of variety across a spectrum of communication functionality. For example, a school leader can use Edmodo to:

• Post pictures and video of a drop-in class visit for parents to view.
• Share monthly school newsletters with all staff, students, and parents.
• Remind students of an upcoming field day or school activity with a permission slip attachment.

“There can be infinite uses of the computer and of new age technology, but if teachers themselves are not able to bring it into the classroom and make it work, then it fails.” — Nancy Kassebaum

When it comes to implementation of a tool or feature, perhaps the most important factor is whether or not practitioners will use it. This is true for the classroom, and it’s similarly true for tools available to school leaders. One way to increase buy-in of a tool is to allow for greater flexibility and choice. On Edmodo, users can elect to receive notifications via text, email, or push in addition to the alerts they see after signing in. All users have access to school communication features on mobile devices. Parents even have their own official Edmodo app where they can keep track of all communication from their child’s teachers, and their school leaders.

In addition, a number of enhancements have been made in recent months to communication capabilities available to schools on Edmodo. Worldwide, school communication on Edmodo has exploded — growing by more than 30 times over the previous year. If your school wants to begin using Edmodo for communication, we’re here to help. Our award winning support team is available at adminsupport@edmodo.com.