Quote:
Originally Posted by keehun
What do you do for your team? How do you manage communications?
Should we communicate with parents? Would that help?
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I did a presentation on this at the Indiana Forums.
Matter of fact, all the presentation from the forums are downloadable here at this "temporary" domain name...long story...
http://www.indianafirst.itap.purdue..../downloads.cfm
Mine is this one:
http://www.indianafirst.itap.purdue....?downloadID=16
In there you will find two things we do.
One is an e-mail lister. I have several groups. "All Team", "Students" "Mentors" "Parents" "Alumni" then I have an SMS Text e-mail list. Generally I send e-mails but if it's important, I send TEXT. All the students have text. What you'll find is you need to communicate with adults via e-mail and students via text. About 50% of my students check e-mail regularly. But they get text instantly. I use the single e-mail lister to send e-mails and send bulk text messages.
During the build season, we use dot project. We keep tasks loaded up in the robot and it builds an online ghantt chart as we go and turns task "RED" for the whole team to see when something gets behind. Also when tasks are marked with progress, and e-mail goes direct to those sub team leaders etc.
Other than that, good old fashion face to face meeting is required for anything major, and often times I find myself repeating myself in an e-mail several times. I am use to it now. I could sent the same information in three e-mails and I will still have someone say they didn't know anything about it. I also try and keep our team calendar up to date. I've heard of several of our team members that use the calendar on our website so I've tried to keep that updated as well.