School Announcement Launches a Blog

Helpful Summer Info for the Busy Education Pro

Dear School Pro,

As an education professional, you well know the benefit of keeping up with current educational topics and sharing your opinions with others. We at School Announcement understand the importance of such positive and timely communication.

In order to help create a unified place where school administrators can interact with one and other while keeping abreast of the latest trends and news in the educational world, School Announcement has launched a blog! Our all-new School Announcement blog can help you in your efforts to connect and engage in conversation with other members of your community.

Check out our blog and the rest of the site, along with the communication-themed articles in this issue of School Pro Quick Tips, and let us know what you think! While you’re on our website, I hope you’ll explore the demos, our resource center and other information we provide, and get back to us with your feedback on how we’re doing. I welcome your calls and emails.

You can reach me by phone at 401-243-8415 or by email at tracy@schoolannouncement.com.

Enjoy the day!

Tracy Duncan

Help Parents Better Help Their Kids

These sites feature either great information directed specifically to parents or helpful tips you and your coworkers can use to enhance your relationships with them. Spread the word:

Helping Children Succeed in School, University of Illinois Extension - The home page of this site features an article entitled “Parental Involvement in School,” which very simply drives home the positive impact that involved parents and caregivers have on their children’s academic achievement. Supporting that idea are other parent-geared topics such as:

• Instill a love in learning
• Learning styles
• Grades - To bribe or not to bribe

Encourage parents to review these quick, compelling reads, sharing your own two cents about what you know that works best for the children they love most.

Teacher Tools - “Paper trails” are typically important in education. Using forms can help in both structuring communications and tracking student progress. You’ll find forms for everything from behavior documentation to grade trackers to a ‘wish list’ here at Use them as they are, or change them up so they are tailored to the specific needs of you and the families you serve.

Education World - We love this list of creative strategies that take parents outside of the usual PTA involvement ideas (though PTAs are certainly wonderful!) and create big wins for students, their parents and teachers.

Enhance Communication with Parents, Board Members & Co-Workers

Enter ‘generations in the workplace’ or ‘generations in the workplace finding common ground’ in your search engine, and start building an understanding of how your communications may be better received and comprehended if you better understand generational traits. Experts divide adults into four distinct categories:

- Traditionalists: Those born 1945 or earlier (age 65 and older)
- Baby Boomers: People in age 44 through early 60s
- Generation X: Ages 30 thru mid-forties
- Millenials: Adults younger than thirty

Their life experiences, motivations, needs and values are all quite different; if you know what they are, you can word your communications in language and symbols to which they can truly take in and respond.