Teacher Made Websites

Elective #6

Here are two very different websites made by teachers for use in their classrooms.

This is Ms. Kreul’s 4^th grade class at Richards Elementary School in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. The curriculum for this class includes language arts, science, social studies, technology, and math. As extras they also have art, music, physical education, French, and library time. This site has a wide variety of resources for both parents and students. The layout is pretty simple and is easy to navigate with a main index page that has links to the other pages. Some of the links for students include a blog page, projects page, students links page, homework page, and links to other interesting sites. Some of the links for parents include a newsletter, parent links, and other information about the classroom and school. This site has also won many awards for the outstanding effort that was put into the webpage both by the teacher and the students.

One thing that I did like about the website is that the students had some input into what was put on the website. There are project pages with samples of student work from previous years and there are pages that were created by the students like the "A Day in 4K" page. This page has pictures and captions for every activity that the students do throughout the day and the students created the captions themselves. This site could be useful to the students in the class in some ways but I see it as being more useful to students that are just joining Ms. Kreul’s class. Those students that do not know anything about the school or this class in particular might find it more informative then someone in the class looking for information on an assignment. There really was no page that describes the assignments and what the teacher is looking for instead there were pages with student’s work. It would also be a good resource for parents who are interested in finding out what their students have been working on. The students involvement in the web page itself is a good experience although it is not evident that the students were directly involved with putting the webpage together they did have some input in creating the site.

This website is from Ms. Edinger's 4th grade class and it is entitled "The Many Faces of Alice" because it is a study of Lewis Carroll's classic children's story, Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland. This website is very different because it only contains information on the project as well as samples of student work from previous years it does not contain any other information about the class or the school.

There is a page where Ms. Edinger explains why she wanted to do this project and why it is important to her. It is important for students to know why they are doing the project and how it will help them. After reading the story in class and studying it extensively the students are broken up into pairs and then assigned a chapter to illustrate themselves. The goal of the project is to make a toy theater production of the book. The website can be useful to new students doing the project because they can look back at projects from previous years and get ideas and thoughts about ways to make their project unique. One downside to the website is that it is difficult to navigate because it is broken down into different pages but there is not really one page that has links to all of the others. I also found that when trying to look at some of the sample projects that the links did not work properly or they took a very long time to load. This is a disadvantage because if students become frustrated or are impatient they may not wait for the page to load and then move onto one that does work. The students are then missing out on the information that that one page might had to offer. There is also an explanation of the assignment and detail about the curriculum for the students but it is very lengthy and wordy. Most students will not take the time to read through all of it therefore they might be losing important information that they need for the project itself.