Classroom Website: Google Sites

Summary

            Blogs are great, Google Docs are great, online quizzes are great, maps are great. But, what’s really great is being able to serve people all of these things in one place. By hosting a website, one is able to have a pages or embedded objects for all of the above. My students, my students’ parents, and my colleagues do not need to check their emails, get on Google Drive, plug-in the URL for my blog, and click a link to a Batchgo map just to access information I have shared. Effective communication is a standard that all teachers should strive to meet; with a Google Site, teachers are able to communicate with a large community of people in and organized and efficient manner.

What I Did and How I Would Use It

The classroom is a community, the school is a community, and each of my students comes from a community of their own. When communities work together bonds form, knowledge becomes synthesized, and developments occur. By creating a classroom website, teachers create a portal through which home and school become joined. Interested parents can address school experiences and learning at home and they are also given a medium through which to collaborate with teachers. Therefore, I created a sample classroom website through which to communicate with students and parents at home. I made sure to include an “About Me” page, an “About our Classroom,” page and pages to encourage collaborative communication (documents and forms, classroom blog, and contact me). To bring the classroom into the home environment, I also created pages that would hopefully inspire parents and students to explore classroom topics together. For instance, I have pages suggesting good books, family field trip locations, and interesting websites. I do not wish to isolate myself from parents as we all have similar hopes for the children in our lives but to bring together school and home in a way that best supports student learning, development, and experience.

Google Sites is a standard option along with Blogger, Google Drive, Google maps, etc. Anyone with Gmail can create a Google Site. Creating a website through Google is very much like creating a blog. To get started, I fiddled around with different templates, fonts, and colors. As with adding pages on a blog, pages can be added to a website. Then, I created several pages, each with a different purpose. To meet my purpose, I chose different layouts for each. I embedded gadgets such a calendar and a slideshow, I embedded pictures, and I created links to web sources as well as additional pages (pages that would not show up on my sidebar). My favorite thing was embedding pictures that could serve as links to new pages.

What I Learned

I’m pretty proud of my website. I love clicking through and looking at all of the pages. I love that I’ve found so many different ways to get information and resources out to students and parents. However, I can see others being more confused than excited by all the extras. With a blog, it may be clearer to parents and students what is new and most relevant. Also, with a blog, I can still organize and emphasize some content. With a website, I am requiring that parents and students either sign up for alerts when I add or change my site or I am requiring that they constantly check my site and sift through my pages for new stuff. To solve this issue, some people may include a link to a blog from their website but it is my personal feeling that a blog is redundant to a website and vice versa. When I have my own classroom, I hope to try to maintain both a blog and website and to assess after some time whether one is more effective than the other. After all, I hope to practice efficiency in the workplace and to maintain so many technological resources, I believe, will call too much attention away from other matters.

Standards Reflection

            Teachers who share a classroom website with parents and students are meeting ISTE-NETS-T’s standard thee “b and c.”  These components of standard three require teachers to communicate relevant ideas through various digital media and formats for the purpose of collaboration in support of student success.