Crisis communication is hard. You need to balance the right message with appropriate timing and send it to the right people through their preferred channels. This equation can become complex for even the most seasoned communicators. Add on multiple crisis scenarios happening at the same time and you have a big challenge that many districts are facing today—communications overload and messaging burnout.

Back to school is the most wonderful time of the year! Educators are busy planning class goals for the year, setting norms and expectations for classroom device use, and supporting families with at-home tips and conversation starters.

Use this evaluation guide as a tool to help you select the website partner that is best for your district. You will discover seven key considerations to keep in mind, along with questions that are critical to ask potential partners when making your decision.

Parents are too busy to seek out information across multiple platforms using numerous passwords. It isn’t convenient or realistic when they’re always on the go. Consolidating all the important information into one mobile app with one login will keep them involved, informed, and engaged.

School closures and remote e-learning has presented an unprecedented opportunity for education leaders to think constructively about the purpose of school and the role of the student in the learning process. These critical discussions have the potential to lead to new discoveries around student engagement, how to create contextually relevant learning experiences, and empowering greater student ownership of the learning process.

The sudden and unplanned move to remote e-learning resulted in a spotlight on the challenges to ensure that every student has appropriate, safe and consistent access to digital tools and resources to support learning outside of school. But creating equity in learning environments is about more than provisioning a Chromebook and a Wifi hotspot to a family. Equity in access to quality teaching and learning matters too.

Read this report to discover the data on how student and teacher communication changed during the 90 days of remote learning during spring 2020.

The cavalcade of school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the sudden and unplanned shift in the delivery mechanism for instruction, from primarily face-to-face, in-classroom instruction to digital learning facilitated over the Internet from home. This forever changed our expectations for teaching and learning in K-12 education, and most certainly has shone a new spotlight on the role of digital tools, content and resources within the learning experience.

Parents want to be informed about every part of their child’s academic experience. To help students be successful, parents need critical data like assignments, grades, and attendance. Providing that valuable data from your SIS and gradebooks, and adding it to your communication channels, will help you strengthen student support and parent engagement.

Blackboard Mass Notifications allows you to reach your stakeholders across all your communication channels simultaneously. This kind of simplified messaging is critical for emergencies and necessary for everyday updates.

Read this ebook written by K-12 communication leaders to learn how build a case for social media, communicate across the different social platforms, gain adoption and measure success.

When did the pandemic alter Student-Teacher communications? Who agrees students communicate more because of technology in the classroom? Where do students prefer to communicate. And the big question...Why?

Within our American system of education, a trust-based relationship between parents and their child's school is absolutely essential. Parents rely upon that relationship every day when they send their child to school with a hopeful aspiration that what happens during the school day will result in their child being well-prepared for further college or career success.

Written in partnership with Project Tomorrow, this report details how districts and schools should consider differentiating their communications based on generational preferences.

Do you know all the components that go into creating great website design? Colors, text, accessibility, functionatlity, and interactivity are just the start. Watch this video to learn the core principals for designing an engaging K-12 website.

Like most technology companies, we at Blackboard track what’s taking place in other industries. We do so both to inform our own innovation, and also to help us anticipate learner, educator and administrator expectations. While in its early stages, the path to personalization in EdTech will be informed, in many ways, by the journey other industries have taken. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

When did people suddenly stop answering phone calls and start dodging voicemails? This change of communication preference certainly aligns with the rise of the internet and mobile devices. Download this report to see the important data that points to a new era of communication.

Read this tip sheet to discover six strategies to consider when forming your teacher and parent communications plan.

The closer communication gets to the classroom, the more relevant it is to a parent. Grades, behavior updates, upcoming assignments, and student successes are extremely important to parents because they directly relate to their child. Sharing this kind of information should be done in a collaborate and safe environment. Use this guide when selecting a vendor for a two-way communication tool for your teachers and parents. Conversations between these two stakeholders is crucial to ensuring the success of your students.

Between March 2020 and March 2021, the United States federal government passed three relief packages that included more than $190 billion of funding for K-12 education. Use this worksheet to identify the challenges your district is facing and how they align with solutions and allowable uses of funding.