Teacher web pages ???

[MikeB]

G'day all,

In search of: Teacher web pages. Would like to see what's out there to inspire me / inform me in the creation of my own teacher's web page. Not interested in commercial sites.

I'm attempting to set-up a "personal" website (personal in the sense that it'll be owned and designed my me) for my students. I've got many of the technical details set-up (domain name, webhost, etc). I'm now starting to work on the content. My objective is to have a site that my students can access to: check for homework (in case they forgot their agendas at school) check for assignments, check to see what they missed when absent, check their grades following exams, as well as provide a link to different resources.

If any of you have set-up a webpage for similar reasons, I'd love to hear from you (with the URL!) .

Many thanks,
Mike B
Quebec, Canada

[dolmansaxlil]

Ugh! I had a webpage for the last year, but I've let the domain expire. It worked yesterday, but it's gone today. I would have loved to have shown it to you. :(

I'm rebuilding the whole school website over this summer, and one of the things I'm adding is a webpage for each teacher so they can update it themselves.

What I did was use WordPress. It's pretty easy to customize a bit if you have any experiences with HTML/CSS. And if you don't have any experience with those things, you can use the templates provided and you never have to deal with the HTML/CSS part of it. It uses PHP as well, but it was easy enough for me to figure out where to copy/paste code from even though I don't use PHP normally. I liked WP because it was very easy for me to update with homework or news each day - as simple as writing an email. I would post whenever I gave a major assignment, with a link to the actual assignment sheet they were given and the rubric. I should have added a calendar plugin, but I didn't like the ones I found, so I ended up just using Google Calendar (there is code to embed the calendar in a WordPress page). This listed all events and assignments.

The only thing that I didn't do that you're looking at is the posting of grades. If you want to go that route, you may need to go with a more advanced content management system (Mambo, Joomla, PHPNuke) in order to pull it off.

I also had a blog for my students, so they would post either to a question I asked, or in reply to each other. Some of them would just post random thoughts at various times through the year. They liked that part of it a lot. When I did it, I just set up another instance of WordPress for my kids, and signed them all up with the same usernames and passwords they use to log into school computers.

I'll see if I can access the database for my site and migrate them over to my new domain to show you...

[MikeB]

Hi Dolman... may I call you D?

Thanks for your response. Yep, sounds like many of the things you did are ones I'm looking at doing. If you ever do get your site back up (if you've got the url, I wonder if I can't get a view of the google-cached version of it...?).

Soon as I'm done writing, I'll look-up Word Press. I failed to mention that I've recently switched over to a Mac after years of frustration with IBM/MS Office. So, I'll have to see if WP works on an OS-X platform.

My better half thinks I'm crazy and that constantly updating will take a fair amount of time/energy. How did you find it last year? I noticed that you teach 7 & 8 - I teach 9 so the age groups are fairly close. Did you have any troubles with their use of the Blog?

Once I'm done wrestling with the minutiae of the contents (particularly the home page welcome argh!) I'll post the URL...just in case you have a few spare minutes. I'd welcome your feedback and criticism.

Cheers,
MikeB
Que. Canada

[dolmansaxlil]

Most people where I use this name call me Dol - D works too. :)

My site is officially gone. The cache has text, but no formatting so it's a disaster.

I believe I've read in the support site that Mac does work with WordPress. I really do recommend it - it's so easy to use, and is easy to make it look good. It has lots of plugins available if you're so inclined. Lots of themes you can choose from, if you want to change it every now and then.

I didn't find that the site was a big time sink at all. I chose to do all the updates as far as homework myself, but you could certainly assign a student to do that, if it's a concern. But with Wordpress, because the databases manage the content, adding a post is as easy as writing an email. Once you get it set up, you don't really have to DO anything to it.

As far as the blog - I used it in a very casual way. The kids were sometimes told to post specific things (at the beginning of the year, I did a lot of getting to know you questions like "What is your favourite song and why?" Sometimes I'd use it to get them thinking about a coming assignment, so before we did Biographies, I asked them to post about who they most admire and why. But for the most part, they just posted goofy things and chatted back and forth. I was more concerned with just getting them writing (as opposed to using it for any sort of assessment) so I let the netspeak and spelling slide. I had no problems with inappropriate content or language. I did read their posts to check for personal information, and would edit if they posted anything I felt was too identifying. I would add the line "Edited by Ms. D to remove personal information". I figured that it was just another means of teaching them how to use the internet safely.

Since you teach grade 9, I'm guessing you teach multiple classes in rotary? If that's the case, you can categorize your posts so they can just see posts for their class if you need to do that.

I also had a photo album up - I used Coppermine, which works fairly well as long as you don't want to put in multiple users. I've switched to a WordPress plugin called qDig for my new site, because it's faster to upload new pictures.

Here's the site I'm working on for the school. The content is FAR from being complete, and none of the teachers have their logins yet, but you can see the basics of what it'll look like, anyways. The front page will, once school starts, have upcoming events and news - the staff list that is there is just a placeholder for now.

http://www.tapsfalcons.com

I still have SO much content to put up, but I need to get a lot of that (Principal's Welcome Message, School Handbook, etc) from other people.

Please do post the URL when you're ready. I'd love to see what you've done!

[orlandoteacher]

Here is mine- very simple but gets the job done!

www.otownteacher.edublogs.org

[awaxler]

If you have a good hosting company you are probably using a cpanel and probably have fantastico...what this means in simple terms is that you can install wordpress with one click of the mouse.

Once you have your wordpress blog installed submit your rss feed to feedburner...you can then add a little snipet of html code into your sidebar and have all your parents sign up for automatic notifications...you can also add "chicklets" so they can subscribe to your blog via MyYahoo, MyAOL etc.

This is all very, very easy to do...I can help you if you need it.

I update my blog once per week for my 8th grade social studies class...I write a short paragraph about what we are doing that week and the homework for each day...sometimes, I even scan in handouts so parents/students can print them from home, but that starts toi become too time consuming.

Take a look at my blog, but keep in mind I just deleted all of last years posts and have been testing and tweaking things ofr the upcoming year...so all you'll see right now are posts that are titled "testing", but you can take a look at my sidebar to see how it looks/works.

http://www.MrWaxlersClass.com

Let me know if you need help...

BTW, parent/admin love it!!

[MikeB]

Hi,

Thanks for the responses. Just got back today from a 8 day vacation to Maine. Great time, btw.

I've briefly perused your sites (Mr Waxler's and Mrs West). Thanks to the both of you. It's late, I'm bushed (suffering from the I need a vacation after my vacation syndrome) so I'll stop here. Will re-visit your sites in the next few days.

Oh, yep, you were spot-on -- Cpanel and Fantastico. Wish I'd had been able to get in touch with you 'bout a month ago. Will relate all in my next missive.

Cheers,
Mike B.

OH, have a great back-to-school - this week for you yanks, I think, yes? I've still got two weeks....time enough to modify/improve my website...with your help, perhaps - although you'll no doubt be crazy busy....
MB

[dr77]

Hello,

I have made a website for my class for the first time and am hoping to use when the school year begins in September (UK).

I made it using Flash and the content of the website is loaded from a Word Document so updating it is very simple - I intend to give pupils responsibility for a section of the website so that they can update it themselves.

I am not sure whether I will be allowed to post a link to a 'demo version' of my class site but I will try to.

If you would like to use it, please contact me and will send it to you completely free of charge and help you to set it up. If your school already has some web space, it will simply be a case of putting the file (which is very small) on there.

Also, you will see that there are some pictures on the website - if you would like to 'personalise' these (perhaps with pictures of your school, classroom, local area etc then I will happily sort this out for you.

If the link doesn't appear, please send me an email.

Hope I am able to help,

David

[Roswenth]

I have been a professional webpage designer in the past, and now I run several communities. I agree with the poster to check out what options you have in cpanel or your admin panel. Wordpress is a really good option for someone who's never done any sort of web design before, and it is easy to install from cpanel. It also has thousands of templates and addons on their website. Many cpanels have some sort of site builder, and those could be good too, depending on how easy they are to maintain and update.

Flash, however, is difficult to update, and though it can be impressive, it might not be best for this type of website that would need constant updating. I would personally recommend against using Flash.

Some things to think about as far as layout are not to use really big text and something like Comic Sans font. Using Wordpress in particular can combat this. Most kids now are very design savvy, and I know middle schoolers who turn out pretty fabulous sites. You might want to look around for a graphics design forum where you can request graphics such as a header, as I work on a forum with a number of teens, and they are very particular about professional-looking graphics. Most of them have been using Photoshop since they could move a mouse.

These are some resources. I have no affiliation with any of these sites; they just might be useful to this discussion.

Wordpress - http://wordpress.org/
HTML code- http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
Graphic requests - http://forumstyles.net/index.php?act=idx
Color codes = http://www.december.com/html/spec/color.html

[rmathome]

Try DapperApple

Its a webste that lets teachers create their own.

I just made one a few weeks ago.

[poetictails]

I think interactive classroom web sites are wonderful. The kids love to be able to get online (EVEN FOR HOMEWORK LOL) and check "their" classroom out.
My son goes to his teacher's site daily just to see if anything new is going on he may have missed and of course the spelling word list is always on their and that helps too.
Parents like these sites because they too can find out more about the teacher and the whole class.