A (FREE!) website for teachers in 20 minutes
Let me preface this post with this: I’m new to this whole blogging/PLN thing – which is a little embarrassing given the name of this blog. For the last week or so, I’ve been looking around the blogosphere, and there is a ton of great stuff out there, so my post today is sort-of rudimentary. That said, I know that there are plenty of teachers out there who would like to (or are being required to) have a website that students and parents can visit, download assignments, and stay caught up with work if they are out of class.
I’ve had websites for my classes since 1996. The technology for website creation has changed a bit since then. <– gratuitous understatement.
As much as I like designing websites (really), I don’t have a designed-from-scratch-with-my-very-own-xhtml-and-css website for my classes anymore. Now – that’s not to say that there’s not a place for those: there most definitely is. Here are a couple of sites I’ve created and that I maintain: 3 Happy Dogs and Blue Door Design
But those types of sites don’t make sense for what 99.9% of teachers want or need out of a site:
- quick to create
- easy to update
- flexible, but with defined choices
- no software to buy
- no software to install in order to maintain the site
For these teachers, I present wikispaces.
There are lots and lots of wiki providers out there, many of whom offer free wikis to K-12 educators. I’ve used quite a few, and I prefer wikispaces. In my opinion, they offer a flexible design, integrate well with google docs and google calendar, youtube, proprofs, slideshare, and other web-based sevices I use. The finished product looks and acts like a “real” website. The one negative is trying to use tables to organize data, and I find that quite a few cloud-computing applications (I’m looking at you, google docs) struggle with that.
Wikispaces are free, but they have ads – UNLESS the site is for K-12 use. Then they are both free and ad-free.
Here’s my wikispace for my class: TBirdScience
Note: I should mention here that wikis have another feature – that of two-way communication and collaboration – that I’m not touching on in this post. It’s a great feature of wikis – and one that I have used with my students with success. In fact, I think it’s such an important part of a 21st century classroom, that I’ll be dedicating several posts to using wikis in that manner soon. Just not this one. 
Getting a wiki set up is about the easiest thing you can do. Just go to wikispaces.com, click on Wikis for Individuals, and on the next page, scroll down to Wikis for K-12 Educators and click the link. From there, choose a username, password, and a wiki name for your first wiki. Here’s a short tutorial video to get you started:
After you’ve created your wiki, you’ll want to start entering content. Here are the first few steps:
Of course, you don’t want to have to re-type all of your assignments (or even copy and paste them), so you’ll want to be able to upload documents and images. Here are the basics:
And lastly, for today at least, a short tutorial on embedding a youtube video.
Jing Tutorials for Homework Help and More
Jing is a free (or almost free) tool from TechSmith that allows you to capture what you are doing on your computer while you narrate. It’s a fantastic tool for creating a quick, “here’s how you do this” video for your students – or anyone else, for that matter.
The almost free part is that Jing sells a “Jing Pro” for $14.95 a year that has more robust features – direct publishing to youtube, saving the file as an mp4 instead of only as a swf, etc. Here’s a comparison table:
I’ve used Jing as tutorial videos for my students on content topics as well as technology topics. For instance, when I had “technology set-up day” in class, I created a checklist of things students needed to do before the class period was over and knowing that they would all work at different speeds, I created quick 3 minute videos on topics like how to set up text message notifications in edmodo.
My students with internet access at home appreciate the tutorial videos I create on the content of my class: 9th grade physics. After school is out and the non-stop steady stream of announcements are over (that no one listens to, that could be far more effective and far less intrusive if the school would just use text messaging), I pull up a problem we worked on in class on my ActiveBoard, run Jing, and walk through the steps of solving the problem.
I used to worry a bit when I was making these videos about misspeaking or stumbling over a word: a 3 minute video might take me 30 minutes to get “perfect.” I don’t worry about that so much anymore – unless I really foul it up, I just correct myself or keep going.
The students that use them say it’s like having me in their home at night when they are doing homework. It’s gotten to the point that they ask me if I’ll be making a video for a particular kind of problem.
I also have found that the videos really help my ELL students – they can pause the video, back up and re-play without feeling like they are calling attention to themselves.
Standards-Based Grading: Passive Aggression
Another thought-provoking blog post (this time from Shawn Cornally) discussing the philosophy of standards-based grading. The comments are also interesting. I thought this quote summed up the pro standards-based stance well:
The conversation played out like this: We talked about how recess is given to elementary students but not to middle or high school kids. We talked about developmentally appropriate education and the psychology of motivation. We talked about how preparing for college is not the same as mimicking college verbatim. Disregarding the psychotic amount of time I get to spend with my high schoolers in favor of the lecture-ignore model that college makes bank off of seems ridiculous to me.
I told her that SBG reflects learning, and grades should not be on the pedestal that they are, acting as the soul product of our school system.
What do you think?
Are Students Apathetic? Or Did We Just Exclude Them From the Conversation?
Today’s blog entry is a link to a discussion happening on a standards-based grading blog I follow. Interesting read. What do you think?
VoiceThread
VoiceThread is a really cool (and free) collaborative tool that I’ve been wanting to integrate into my classroom for a while now. I first discovered it two or three years ago and was struck by the possibilities. It’s a place where you can have a group conversation around documents, images, and videos. Basically, you can upload a document, an image, or a video and then invite a group of students to comment on it. Students can comment by phone, by text, by video. The upload can be annotated by the student, and their annotations show up as they are talking and then “magically” fade away when they finish talking so that the next student’s comments start with a clean slate. I’m sure I’m not describing it very well, but if you take a quick look at it, I think you’ll see some amazing possibilities. One thing that struck me as powerful right away was the possibility of alternative assessments for students. I think ELL students would be helped with this technology as well, because they would have to opportunity to listen to their peers comment (and revisit those comments) – and watch their peers annotate – on a topic in a way that is more concentrated than in a typically noisy classroom discussion. Check it out. If you’ve used voicethread in your classroom, I’d love to hear how it went – what worked great? What didn’t work at all?
Online Learning
I began changing how I felt about online learning about three years ago, when I was working on Master’s in Educational Technology at the University of Missouri. The program in Ed Tech is available in the traditional face-to-face coursework, but since I live in Denver and had zero intention of moving to Columbia, Missouri, I opted for the online option. It revolutionized my teaching. Let me explain: because I began to understand and experience first hand the depth at which I had to engage with the coursework to participate properly in an online course, I began to look at my students sitting in my face-to-face classes differently. In a face-to-face class, students could show up on time, have a few comments during class, and appear to have prepared for class. As I quickly discovered, this is not true when your online post is there for your classmates to read multiple times and challenge ask you about your perspective/point-of-view.
It was a lot of work, but I was hooked. Absolutely, I love the flexibility of online courses: I could work when it makes sense for me: at 5 AM before you get ready for work, on my lunch break, or at 10 PM after the day has (mostly) passed by. But I fell in love with how much I was learning that I could bring directly to my classroom – immediately.
What to Post? Other Blogs to Link To? Do I Have Words of Wisdom Worth reading?
I’ve had this “itch” to write a blog for a while. That said, finding the time to write thoughtful posts is a challenge. But I’d like my blog to reflect my learning in the classroom and I’d like my blog to be useful to other teachers, so I struggle between the “I really don’t have time” and the “I should put some effort into getting this thing off the ground.”
Honestly, I’m not sure what this blog is going to turn into. I’m inclined to just let it grow into whatever it becomes. Maybe one day I’ll look back on this post and think, “how sweet and naive I was.” Or maybe I’ll abandon this blog like so many before me…only time will tell, I suppose.
