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Teacher Websites
Many teachers create websites for their students. Typically their goals
are to enhance their students' learning and to improve communication
with
students and parents. I would like to encourage you to also consider
using your website as a place to publish (or make public) outstanding
student work--something that surprisingly few teacher or school sites
feature, interestingly enough.
Here are a couple of examples of websites created by preservice and practicing teachers.
Spend some time taking a good look at these examples below to get some
ideas of the kinds of things you might want to do with a website:
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Note:
All the examples described below use some kind of a webpage editor
posted to a webserver. But there are new Web 2.0 tools (also called
read/write web tools) that are easy to use and do not require learning
either the web editor or posting to a separate server. These are tools
like blogs and wikis.
Background
- A thoughtful research-based discussion of how websites can be
used to better connect families and the school. Published in a middle
school technology journal edited by graduate students at North Carolina
State Universtiy.
http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/win2003/involvement/6.html
- A
first person account by one middle school English teacher who created
his own website and has seen its use steadily and dramatically increase
as it becomes an important resource for his students and student
centered projects. Note that the author structured his site into three
main areas: a place for the teacher to publish information, a place for
students to publish final projects, and a place for class discussions.
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/15805_3
- A succinct "how to" guide about building a classroom website
written for teachers by a professor at Western Michigan University.
Topics include what makes a quality teacher website (criteria) and how
do I create a classroom website (step-by-step). This isn't a tutorial
on web editing software, but instead a careful way to think through the
structure and content of your site. Written for preservice teachers, it has content valuable to practicing teachers as well.
http://www.wmich.edu/teachenglish/subpages/technology/classwebsite.htm
Some Pacific
students' teacher websites
Eduscapes teacher website: http://eduscapes.com/sessions/brick/brick1.htm
Assignment:
Go online and search to see if you can find some other examples
(perhaps even from your mentor teachers) of professional websites that
teachers have created that you think would be good examples for the
rest of us. One way to do this task would be to explore the Eduscapes
website listed above and see if there are any particularly worthy of
your attention. I would especially encourage you to look for sites from
practicing teachers that feature student projects or student work. If
you find one that you would like to bring to the attention of the
group, post it in WebCT with your brief comments as to why you thought
it was valuable.
In class next time we will use a website editing tool to put together
the first parts of a professional website for you. Come to class
knowing 3-5 major headings you'd want to use for your website. We'll
finish this first draft in class; some of you may choose to go on with
this task and make it your final project.
Additional teacher website development resources:
Public domain open source webpage editor--N/VU
http://www.nvu.com/
Teacher webpage templates from a school district in Alabama.
http://www.shelbyed.k12.al.us/webtemplates.html
Note
that these webpage templates have an ownership claim; I would recommend
that if you want to use one of these templates that you contact the
district for permission.
To use these template pages, file/save them from within your browser and then open the files in your web editor.
- Website basics--Download a document
that gives
an overview of some of the website building skills discussed in
class.
- The best N/Vu tutorial is the User
Guide found in the Help menu in the software itself. There is also a
good (but rather detailed) tutorial at http://www.thesitewizard.com. I would recommend tutorial 2 about fonts, images, and adding text to your page.
- A template I developed for teacher websites. This is a 5 page template that you can use to create your own teacher website.
- Some sample digital portfolio templates.
I
use these with our EDUC 625 class, but you could rework them into
multiple
page websites of your own that have nothing to do with being a
portfolio.
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