Expanding Parental Involvement in Education: How social media and online Communication affect the Family-School relationship

Abstract

Developing parental involvement in the educational process has been repeatedly proposed as a tool for imparting human values to the children beyond solely improving academic outcomes, thus becoming part and parcel of school as well as parental cultures. Parents’ adequate involvement and participation and their cooperation with the school and education staff also help mitigate the behavioral problems and dilemmas that children may encounter at school and raises their academic achievement. This paper includes study that explores the extent of the growth and expansion of Social Media and online Communication this new form of communication between family and school, its paths and potentials and pros and cons from the perspectives of parents and educators, with the aim of producing recommendations that help both. The research could count on the participation of 103 parents and 105 educators from Arab schools in Israel.