Call Me?

Communication is one of the most important things in being a teacher.  You have to communicate your ideas to colleagues, students, parents, and more.  In order to do this it is important to keep your channels open.  Sometimes this can be easy and sometimes it's harder than you thought.

Having gone through your welcome training, you were probably given an e-mail and told what your phone number is.  At this point everything seems to be complete and ready to communicate as much information as you can.  For me, it was not.  Even though I had received an e-mail, I had not been updated on the school website and thus, unless a student had carefully placed their syllabus with loving care is a known location, e-mail at first was a challenge until it was updated.  To fix this first problem I talked with several people in the school and was directed to the technology where I informed them of the problem and they very kindly and efficiently fixed the problem for the future.  While it seems like something simple, with everything else coming at you at the beginning of school, you want to take a minute to check how you are posted on the website.  The second issue came with the phone.  First the name was not listed on the directory so after some searching I was lead to the office to report this.  As a lot of parents call it is important to check the directory out.  Along with the directory for the phone, it's important to set up your voice mail in order to receive messages.  Depending on the school system it will take different methods but for mine it involved calling a certain number, entering a code, then changing your password and recording your voice message.  Make sure to have some patience, I ended up receiving 4 e-mails, each with different instructions before I was forwarded a 5th and correct e-mail.

To sum this all up, just make sure that when you are communicating that others can communicate back with you.