Refreshing the Traditional Staff Memo

Earlier this school year, I learned about a newsletter creator from reading posts on Twitter. I dabbled with SMORE until this New Year, when I made a concerted effort to refresh my traditional staff updates to my team. For the past three years, I have sent a “Friday Focus” via email to my staff. The memo consisted of the following components:

1. Great Things I Noticed This Week: An opportunity for me to recognize the great learning and teaching that is going on in the building.

2. What’s on the docket: This bulleted lists just details lunch menu, events, professional development opportunities, or scheduled changes.

3. Nuts and Bolts: This is the ‘business’ section of the memo that lists information pertinent to the logistics of running the building; when report cards should go out, information about an upcoming assemblies, or updates about assessments, ect.

4. Pins, Tweets, and Blogs, Oh, My! : Various posts from Pinterest, Twitter, or blogs that I have found that are valuable to share. Often times I focus these on particular concepts or align them to our school goals.

5. What I’m Reading: A simple update to staff that includes a picture of the title or titles that I am currently reading.

Despite my satisfaction with the content of the memo, I was underwhelmed with how I was sharing this information. SMORE seemed to be the perfect answer for refreshing my traditional written memo! SMORE is available for free to educators with some limited functionality or costs $59.00 a year for extra features that include personalized backgrounds, analytics, and group emailing features. Whereas I was satisfied with the free version, I did recently upgrade for the year to have some of the Pro features.

The best part of SMORE for me, is the ability to embed video links and play the videos within the context of the newsletter as well as embed the finished newsletter in a blog or other platform. After reading “Your School Rocks, So Tell People!” (Ryan McLane and Eric Lowe) I decided to do video updates. The main structure of my newsletter is the same, but I now have the ability to embed this video component and model for my staff effective strategies for engaging families or students. The interface is easy to use and allows me to simply upload photos, videos, links, articles, and more!

 

You can view a completed newsletter below:

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