KICTCFT Competency
The teacher can use ICT tools to communicate with students and other stakeholders in the education community so as to nurture students’ learning.
Specific Objectives: On completion of this unit you will be able to:
Recommended time: 45 minutes
Sub-unit Competency
This unit introduces you to applications and skills that you will be required to establish and use in order to communicate with your learners, colleagues, parents and the broader community on a day-to-day basis. Issues to be discussed in this unit include: how to set up communication structures such as e-mail, social networking sites and applications, how to communicate with all school stakeholders. We will also look at basic communication strategies.
Activity 1: Why Bother with the Community?
The following two resources will give you a clear picture about the importance of community communications in education. Please read the documents carefully.
Recommended time: 30 minutes
Sub-unit Competency
An easy way to use ICT to support community communication is to create group e-mail lists. Collect the e-mail addresses of parents or members of a specific interest group (PTA committee members, Sport teams etc.) and use your e-mail program to create groups. Write one communication, address it to a group and push send! Let's find out how it is done!
Activity 2: Group e-Mail
The following resource explains how to create e-mail groups using Gmail. If you don't have a Gmail account you can create one or investigate how your e-mail client handles the creation of group mails. They all support this function so spend some time now to see if you can set up a group.
Recommended time: 45 minutes
Sub-unit Competency
We set up a Skype account in the unit on 'Collaboration and Communication'. In this sub-unit we will investigate how we could use this tool to communicate with community groups.
Activity 3: Group Skype Communication
The following resources explain how to link up more than one person simultaneously in Skype effectively, by creating a conference call. The third resource shows that even if bandwidth is not good enough for a voice call you can always use the Skype chat facility to communicate with a group. Study the resources and then open Skype on your computer and see if you can link some of your class colleagues into a group call.
Recommended time: 30 minutes
Sub-unit Competency
This sub-unit introduces you to the world of social networking. There is a lot of 'buzz' at the moment about these Internet services that link people of similar interests. The most popular are Facebook and Twitter. In this sub-unit we will investigate how we can use them to help us communicate with our wider school community.
Activity 3: Social Networking and Communication
Recommended time: 60 minutes
Sub-unit Competency
Could we use Facebook to enhance community communications? Let's find out.
Activity 4: Facebook account, groups and pages
Recommended time: 90 minutes
Sub-unit Competency
The majority of people use smart phone or tablets in preference to Windows based PCs or laptops. Are there any popular apps we could use for community communication? In this sub-unit we will investigate WhatsApp.
Activity 5: WhatsApp
Portfolio Assignment: School Community Communication Implementation Plan
Use any program you feel comfortable with and draft an implementation plan designed to enhance the school's community communication. The plan should outline what combination of ICT tools and services you would suggest to senior management to enhance communication with the school stakeholders. Use the assignment upload tool below, entitled 'Portfolio Item #10: Community Communication Implementation Plan', to submit your document.
Facilitator's Feedback
Once you have completed the readings and activities above access the facilitator's audio summary below of the salient points raised in this unit.
Open Education Resources
The following Open Education Resources (OER) have been adapted to create this unit on community communications:
- Available online here
Images have been adapted from:
The following references are also acknowledged:
This unit has been adapted from OER and developed further by Mr Martin Kavua. The unit was revised by Martin Kavua and Andrew Moore.
All material in this Kenya ICT CFT Course unit is licensed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Kenya under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License with the exception of the resources listed below:
Sophia Guevara. An Introduction to Facebook;
Anum Hussain. (2012). How to Create a Facebook Business page in 5 Simple Steps. Hubspot;
Burgess, D. (nd). Bridging the Gap Between Parents, Pupils and Schools. Teaching Times;
Obrien, A. (2011). What Parents Want in School Communication. Edutopia;
Scottish Govt. (2013). Parent Council Resource: A Guide to Gathering Views and Ensuring Parent's Voices are Heard in Your School. (c);
Queen's Library. (nd). Beginner's Guide to Social Media.
Were, D. (2014). The Number of Social Media in Kenya. HapaKenya.
Mola, E. (2013). How Kenya turned to Social Media after Mall Attack. CNN.
All content not licensed under a Creative Commons license is all rights reserved, and you must request permission from the copyright owner to use this material.
The KICTCFT Course is in it's pilot phase. Please provide feedback on your experiences with this unit to allow us to improve it.