Have
you ever have had a moment when you've discovered, upon emptying
your child's school bag, that homework or a field trip permission slip
was overdue? Even if you
haven't, if you're the average parent, you probably live in fear and
anxiety about such an event. (Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a
little.)
PTOs provide many great services; one of the most important is the
sending of notices about homework, field trips, meetings, and other
events.
On a typical school week, depending on grade level, a student could
bring home anywhere between 10 and 50 sheets of paper. Many times,
especially in busy households with younger children, the papers don't
always get emptied out daily as they should be. Even when
they do, paper has this ugly tendency to pile up or get lost. I think
you'll agree when I state that paper accounts for a good portion of
household stress —
imagined or otherwise.
Some PTOs, such as the one in Dover-Sherborn, MA, have declared that
they want to go "paperless". While that is a commendable
goal, it is impractical for many PTOs to abandon paper in favor of
email or the web due to various factors, such as:
- Not everyone has
access to a computer and Internet, although this
situation is rapidly changing
- Trying to separate
notices for those parents who chose email versus
those that didn't is much more work than just giving everyone paper
notices
- Paper is far more
dependable than computers, which could have
problems with viruses, crashed disks, downed networks, and so on.
- Some documents, such
as permission slips, are highly customized and don't lend themselves
particularly well for paperless operation.
No doubt, paper will remain an important means of PTO communication for
a long time. But it doesn't have to remain a source of
anxiety and frustration to those of us that are more comfortable
dealing with electronic communication.
Mediabee makes it easy for any group of parents to help each other
reduce the anxiety related to paper notices.
For example, my daughter brought in the Westborough Mill Pond
School
Fireflies Assignment Schedule
- three sheets of paper with about 15
different due dates. It took me 2 minutes to create a list in Mediabee
by the same name.
It looked something like this (literally):
Reading assignment #1 due, 10/1
Writing project #1 due, 10/5
Science project #1 due, 10/8
Writing project #2 due, 10/12
Science project #2 due, 10/15
Math project #2 due, 11/15
...
I then chose the "Share Publicly" button to share the
list with my local community - two additional clicks.
Voila, the 90 students belonging to the Westborough Mill Pond
Fireflies team now had an easy way to get this schedule on their
calendars - just by clicking on the Subscribe link in Mediabee.
"So how is this different from my teacher posting her homework schedule
on a website?", you ask. The problem with putting up
schedules on websites is that there are usually too many of them for an
average parent to consult - and not enough ways for them to personalize
their schedules. The athletics schedule is on one
website, the systemwide school schedule on another, each child's
homework schedule on a different website, and so on. It is impractical
for today's busy parent to keep track of all the different websites.
The current crop of electronic calendaring tools don't make
it easier either.
Mediabee brings all the schedules together directly to the user's
desktop with a simple and intuitive user interface. Mediabee is free,
so there's no costs involved for anyone to start using it. Using
Mediabee any group of individuals, such as a parent teacher group,
soccer team, scout troop or even friends and neighbors, can make life
easier for each other as outlined above.
Instead of having to sift through the town's entire athletic schedule,
for example, a Mediabee user can specifically view the Girls' Under 14
Recreational Soccer Team B schedule. If such a schedule is not
available, the user can, while entering it into Mediabee for her
daughter, simply designate the list to become publicly available, so
other parents will have that resource.
The neat thing is, if the list creator makes a change or adds a new
entry, everyone gets the changes automatically, along with an email
notice to that effect. The user can even designate selected Mediabee
users as "co-publishers" of the list so that any one of the
list's publishers can make a change.
What applies to a homework schedule applies equally well to any kind of
team schedule - soccer, basketball, or scouts. How can you apply this
great tool in your group? Write to us with your questions and
experiences - send an email to groupuse@mediabee.com. We'll
be very happy to get your team started with Mediabee.
Sincerely,
Saro Saravanan
Founder
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