Teacher Made Websites

I hit pay dirt on this assignment when I typed in “classroom websites” as my search term. My search touted 200510 hits. Now the job was to wade through them! I also tried “classroom homepages”, but this (for some reason) yielded a lot of links that were not really related to the prime objective of my searching. The mother lode of websites came at www.homeroomteacher.com/classlink.html.

Wow! So many to choose from, and so many good ones!

I’ll start with one of the most impressive. This was an elementary school website posted by 5^th grade teacher Mr. Cameron Williams at the Carlton Oaks School of the Santee School District. The commendations about this website are numerous. The first thing that struck me was the wealth of photographs of Mr. Williams classroom and his students at work on various projects. What a great thing it is for the students to have the opportunity to advertise themselves, to be able to call up the website at home and show “Mom” and “Dad” exactly what’s going on. Mr. Williams even included a link to photographs of his own family. Mr. Williams’ site include a virtual tour of his classroom as well. The wealth of graphic material might clutter up a website if not organized well, and this site is organized very well with clear links to each subcategory including current assignments and grades. These last two items, I think are crucially important to any teacher developed website or what’s the purpose of the site? Mr. Williams’ students can log on and see reminders of assignments past and upcoming due dates. The most important item on the website (definitely, the most important item on the website) is the link to emailing Mr. Williams. If there is anything that leads to successful teaching it is the communication that goes on between teacher and parents. Do I have recommendations for Mr. Williams? This is tough; his site seems so complete. Maybe Mr. Williams could make his links to helpful websites for his students a bit more attractive with the kind of graphics which he is, obviously so adept at using. Perhaps these links could also be organized in more content area ways. I don’t know how often Mr. Williams updates photographs on the site – I’m going to imagine he does so quite often – but that would be a final (perhaps, unnecessary) suggestion.

I wanted to check out a high school website as well, since that is where I do my teaching. I latched onto a site posted by a Ms. Stewart at Grand Blanc High School. Ms. Stewart is a history teacher; honors U.S. History and AP U.S. History. Ms. Stewart’s website is of the more basic variety with little to decorate it. Perhaps that is the difference between elementary and high school. I know it would be difficult for me to post photographs of all my students in action since I teacher five classes and nearly 150 student. Still, never having created a website myself, I am impressed with Ms. Stewart’s page. She has organized her classes in an easily accessible chart form so students can go directly the class in which they are enrolled. Ms. Stewart has posted her syllabus for each class and her grading policy – no questions there for either students or parents; it’s all made very clear. She has made the weekly schedule of classroom and homework assignments available as well as the school’s calendar of activities. Ms. Stewart offers links to grading rubrics for individual projects and helpful links to sites that would help her students create the perfect project. Ms. Stewart has a “meet the teacher” link and (of course) a direct link to her email. Suggestions: Speaking from experience, it’s hard enough for me to come up with ideas for the bulletin boards in my classroom, but Ms. Stewart might consider the addition of interesting graphic material to the home page. Get ‘em hooked early on the site. Each link might also be represented by an instructive graphic that would indicate at a glance what’s available via any particular link. Lastly, Ms. Stewart might add her own evaluation of some of the resources to which she links her students, advising them of the strengths and/or weaknesses of each of the helpful resources. I would also post a concise bibliography format; no matter how often or in how many places bibliography formats are posted (let’s say in the media center site), students seldom use such helpful information unless it’s right there at their fingertips.

I’ll finish by mentioning some sites I found that help teachers create their own websites. These include: Teacher Closet at www.teachercloset.com/websites.html,

www.onlinesolutionsforeducators.com/30min/30min.htm, a site posted by an individual teacher at www.suelebeau.com/freetools.htm and Create Classroom Web Sites at www.people.bu.edu/bthom/edcoclass-classwebpages/classwebpage1.html.