Welcome Back!

Forecast for Communication in the Lower School: Cloudy!

Pictures from the Lower School 
2nd-4th grade Spring Concert
Pictures by Michael Rodenbush

It has been almost two years now that the weekly Lower School Notes has been delivered as a digital Blog, available on the internet, in the “cloud”. With currently close to 24,500 “reads” from 41 countries, the average per week reads have increased to almost 500! Yes, we still do have one hard copy sheet of minimal information that goes in the backpacks on Fridays, called “Just the Facts” for parents who need something to put on their refrigerators. However, by contrast, articles that speak to parenting and our philosophy of teaching and learning are for the blog only, complete with clickable links to related articles, supporting research and book recommendations. The blog allows us to include student writing, pictures and videos of what happened during the week, with the ability to look back or search older posts only a click away. The blog software allows us to know the number of reads, where the reads were from geographically, even track what percent of the reads were on smartphones (50%) PCs (40%) and tablets (10%). We assume that with 500 reads per week and only 240 Lower School students, that in many families, both moms and dads are reading and that the link is forwarded to many grandparents and other family members outside the U.S. Some of the reads may also come from prospective parents who reach the blog through the link on the admissions section of the School’s website.

But wait, there’s more - more blogs: Preschool 3, preschool 4 and kindergarten all have blogs. There are also blogs for Lower School Technology, Third through Fifth grade Spanish, Lower School Mathematics and the Lower School Strings Program. Then there is also a student run fifth-grade “Opera-tunity” blog, and in development is a student maintained site for student reviews for books and reading recommendations for all Lower School grade levels. In spring we will launch our digital Lower School Literary Magazine site through which all students from preschool through 5th grade will be able to showcase and digitally publish their work for the world to see.  That’s a lot of digital presence in the cloud, all of which can be linked to from the weekly Lower School Notes blog always available at <http://d-e-lowerschool.blogspot.com/>. What all this means for parents is that they can have weekly insights into what it is that their children are doing and what is going on in the Lower School.  

For students, they increasingly have the ability to publish their ideas and their work to the world. This is a far more empowering notion than just having your work on a bulletin board outside of their classroom. Knowing that you can share your artwork or your writing with your grandparents in Indonesia, South Africa or Gabon provides tremendous motivation for students.

Of course, most of our older Lower School students’ work is already stored “in the cloud,” through shared Goggle Docs that they can access from any device anywhere that has internet access. This includes text documents, spreadsheets, charts, presentations and drawings, all of which can not only be shared with others, but also can be setup for simultaneous collaborative editing.

Although we all look forward to a forecast for a sunny day, when it comes to communication, cloudy is the way to go!

Video of Spring Concert

It’s Back!!!D-E’s GOT TALENT!!!

It is that time of year again!!! For Lower School Family Fun Night on Friday, April 26th from 7-9pm, we will have an evening of our very own D-E’s GOT TALENT!!! We are looking for polished acts such as dancers, bands, singers, magicians, jugglers, comedians and solo musicians. If your child is interested in signing up you may get a permission slip from Mrs. Rullo. We would like parents to encourage their children to make sure they are well prepared for the evening and the permission slip is to ensure your cooperation. Please fill it out and return it no later than Friday, April 12th. Siblings may share a slip, please include all participants in your act and write the “title” as you would like it to appear in the program. The first 20 slips to be signed and returned will be accommodated for this year’s event. All participants must have a signed permission slip in order to sign-up and participate.

A run-through on Thursday, April 25th at 3:30pm is required for all participants. If they are unable to make the run-through, please email Ms. Moriarty (moriac@d-e.org)

A technical rehearsal will occur at 5pm on the evening of the Showcase and all should be in attendance.

Sign-up after Permission Slip is completed!

Permission Slip