Abstract:

The new times we live in, with new family structures, extended working hours and the new ways we have adopted of communicating with each other… constitute structures on which schools and teachers must base themselves (Miraut, 2011). However, parent teacher meetings have always been dealt with very traditionally with little room for innovation; in our opinion, school meetings between the teacher, parents and student should be addressed from a more realistic approach in line with the times.

Our current legislative framework, the Education Act (LOE), (Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, 2006), establishes as one of teachers’ principal functions ‘student tutoring, management and orientation of their learning and support in their educational process in collaboration with the family’. Moreover, Article 1 establishes another function: ‘periodic communication with the family to transmit information about their child’s learning process together with guidelines for their cooperation in this area’. It also invites the education authorities to use ITC in schools and support permanent training plans -Article 102- and the establishment of ITC learning support programs – Article 157. Likewise, Article 112 stipulates that education authorities must make it possible for schools to count on the necessary infrastructure to guarantee the incorporation of ITC in educational processes.

Therefore, Information and Communication Technology, taken as a set of advanced tools and devices which integrate functions of storage, processing and transmission of data, as well as reinforcing social relationships (Trujillo, 2012) through the use of twitter, Whatsapp, etc., incorporate a series of advantages to the tutoring function (Aznar, 2007) such as saving time, real time information, joint student-family responsibility, the elimination of time barriers, etc. We should not overlook, however, the drawbacks this may have for teachers such as loss of privacy or saturation of messages.

We have carried out research in a Preschool/Primary school in the province of Jaen where we have asked approximately 200 families about the type of parent teacher meetings they prefer, and aspects such as their knowledge and use of social networks, compatible schedules between work and parent teacher meetings and the suitability of some of these tools used for this purpose.

Keywords:

Parent teacher meetings, Social networks, Preschool and Primary Education, Communication.