Getting Organized
We put a blurb in our weekly send-home and twelve volunteers came forward that were interested in helping us with this!
School Moments has designed an easy to follow pathway for both setting up the program and for using it throughout your school year. Here's a preview of how it works:
- Administrator (you) signs up (below).
- School Moments representative contacts you and helps you to complete the set up process.
- You log in the first time and encounter an easy to follow to-do list with helpful hints on every page.
- You enter the name(s) of the involved teachers and classrooms.
- School Moments program automatically generates passwords for you to distribute to each participating teacher.
- You, a secretary or volunteer, or teachers enter the names of the students.
- Students are given a "packet" to take home. The program creates these for you. They include instructions, log in information for students/parents, and a form to fill out and return with names and email addresses
- Students bring back forms with names and email addresses. (Hey, have a contest!)
- Parents, teachers, or secretaries enter the names and email addresses on this web site.
All the hard work is done now!
The program will automatically invite people to sign up to receive the student newsletters on your behalf. Before you know it, you'll have hundreds in your readership! It will even send them a thank you note for you! Now, it's time to get organized for making your publications.
These are the things to consider:
- Who enjoys taking pictures at your school?
- Unless you have ample teacher aides and volunteers, organize computer buddies to pair up with your younger or handicapped kids to help them type in their articles. Organizing this for once a month will be more than enough. Alternatively, send the (very easy and short) writing assignments home and let parents log in with your young students and help them type in their short article for publication. Keep in mind that young kids typically create 3 to 4 sentence articles.
- Call a 45 minute meeting with a few creative staff as you're getting the program set up, and map out your article ideas for the year in advance.
- Schedule computer time (once a month will be fine) for your older students (with keyboarding skills) to type in their articles. (Chances are they have some "computer time" now in their schedule. Ask the computer teacher to work this program into the schedule once a month).
- Schedule publication dates (get input from entire staff). It's easy to do this on the site.
- Provide teachers and staff with the webinar schedule that School Moments provides for staff orientation
The site's photo library allows everyone to become involved and add school pictures into a shared file from any location. Teachers can easily look in the image library and select and attach a picture or group of pictures to a student or teacher article. It's fun and it invites creativity from everyone.
Leverage your organizational skills at the beginning of your first School Moments year, and you'll be rewarded for years to come. You'll find the site is quite easy to use. Before long, everyone takes ownership of the small part they contribute, and School Moments publications start going out - and the positive remarks start coming in.
