Keep parents informed Minimum version: FirstClass 8.3 Audience: Teachers       Experience: FirstClass applications used: Calendars Conferencing Summary Want to keep parents informed about what is happening with students? Create a parents conference to keep communication open. Here, you can post letters for parents, outline assignment information, show student work, and maintain a class calendar.         Note to admin To maintain security, create accounts for each set of parents. This keeps the information secure, and parents can access their accounts from the client or over the web. Example John Smith is a teacher at Avalon Academy. He wants to maintain open communication with parents, so he creates a Parents conference in his class conference, and then subscribes parents so the conference appears on their Desktops. His Parents conference contains the following: •       a calendar to post important dates such as field trips and due dates •       an About this conference document outlining what the conference is about •       a Homework conference so parents and student know what is expected of their child •       a Contact Information document with contact information details for John Smith and all the parents who use the conference. This will allow parents to post any questions or comments to the teacher or other parents privately. •       a Field Trip conference to manage field trip information (more) •       a chat room so parents can communicate with the teacher and each other John can also hold parent information sessions and conduct parent-teacher interviews using the chat room or instant messaging. •       a Meeting Minutes conference to post the minutes of parent information sessions that John holds •       a Gallery conference to display student work (more). Letters and notes for parents are put in the bottom pane of the window. Here, John can update parents about what students are learning, what may be required of parents, permission forms, and school announcements. This is what his Parents conference looks like. Let's look at some of the subconferences. This is the Parents calendar. This is a chat room session John is using for a parent-teacher interview. This is the Gallery conference. This is the Homework conference. Variation FirstClass ED has dedicated areas for many of these types of tasks. For more information about FirstClass ED, see Using FirstClass ED. To purchase FirstClass ED, contact your sales representative.