Introducing the K¹² Parents' Lounge

What a summer! Back in March, Dianne, Steph and I were tasked with a challenge to find a way to make it easier for K¹² parents to connect with each other. While we currently have the private online community called thebigthinK, because of the presence of students we are constrained by the communication features that "TBT" can provide. We thought of a bunch of ways around that and finally settled on something rather bold--creating an entirely new community built especially for parents.

We spent months planning, building and testing--and had the help of 75 fantastic K¹² parents who volunteered to be "Founding Members." The result is the new Parent's Lounge, which officially launched this week.
 

The Parents’ Lounge is an online community exclusively for parents, teachers and school administrators to connect and share information and advice in order to help families get the most out of their K¹² experience. It doesn’t replace individual school spaces in thebigthinK¹² where important school-specific documents and information will continue to be available to parents, but rather it complements thebigthinK¹² by providing more features that allow members to communicate with each other. K¹² parents can think of their school space on thebigthinK as “the office”—the place where they can find information and documents specific to their school—and the Parents Lounge as “the social center”—the place where they can find and connect with other K¹² adults.

I put together a short video that lists some of the cool new features of the Parents’ Lounge—but if you’re a K¹² parent and want to dive right in and start connecting, just access thebigthinK through MyInfo or the OLS and click on the “Parents’ Lounge” link in the side navigation.

See you in there!