I just want to share how great technology is with school communication now a day. In addition to the emergency call when your individual child is having issue or trouble they would call directly to the parents or guardian, then text or email as necessary as individual issue arise. Now that’s just for individual isolated issue communication.
Let say you have hundreds or thousands of students need to contact their parents or guardian directly and immediately, that’s where mass communication come in and it work great. Well, at least the school district where I reside. The communication appear to be weekly at least on Monday on what the school activities will be with Monday to Friday scheduled, and then another communication Friday end of the week on their goal being reached or accomplished based on Monday’s communication. These are being sent via E-Mail and text messages with link to the newsletter, now that’s just newsletter. During emergency or some kind of incident that would required the school to send messages to the parents, it would be through the phone voice system or text messages for immediate notification. Notification like school locked down, school fire alarm, water failure, power failure … so and so fort, we would get notification right away through our mobile phone text messages or voice mail/call. In addition we can also check on the school website.
Imagine long time ago where we don’t have mobile phone, but maybe some people household have landline, that would work but imagine having have to call each individual students parents, it was not doable. Most of the time stuff happened in school the only way to find out is when the student come home and tell their parents or guardian what happened today at school.
Some school now a day allow cell phone mobile phone usage in school, but there are guideline and restriction on social media posting and can only be use outside of class time, meaning if you finished your assignment then you can use it. I think allowing the students to use their mobile phone responsibly is a great idea, just in case they need to capture certain event on video that could potentially provide evidence in the court of law or for official usage. Or they can call their parents guardian in case something happened to them or the school had problem communicating. Let’s hope the cell phone system antenna can handle large load of usage.
Off course there are negative side on allowing students to use cell phone in school. Big problem distraction, but it can be controlled through guideline, if guideline or policy and if violated the student individual would face the consequences of not able to use the phone for certain period of time or possible disciplinary action. Just like any other rules at school it can be controlled, and off course there will be some students will keep breaking the rules and will face punishment.