10 Tips For An A+ Classroom Website

Teachers, welcome to your one-stop resource for building your very own classroom website. Please take a look at the ten tips below and feel free to leave your comments or questions at the end of the write-up. Creating a direct line of contact from you to the parents of your students can improve your classroom dynamic in many ways. First, it allows parents to become more involved with the daily school life of their child. Second, your classroom website helps increase the level of responsibility placed on the students in your class. The excuses of “forgetting” about an assignment or other deadlines are a thing of the past when you present all the relevant and necessary information to students and parents in a format that can be readily accessed away from school. In this article we’ll be using examples from Sandvox from Karelia Software, creators of easy to use website software for the Mac, though these tips should apply no matter what tool you use. Depending on the grade level you teach, it can be very helpful to include basic course information for each of your classes.

Including a syllabus, course summary, list of course objectives, etc., helps to more fully inform parents about the topics being taught to their students. Such information can be just as handy for the students in your classes. Making homework files available on your classroom website serves many useful purposes. First, it allows absentees or disorganized students to complete their assignments without extension or having to go through you to pick up the homework. Second, including a list of homework on your site helps parents to stay informed and fact-check what their kids are telling them in regard to homework and deadlines. Some modern web design programs will allow you to setup a list of downloadable content. Whether you use Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or PDFs, students and parents will be able to access and download content in the event of an absence or if (when) their child misplaces an assignment. It is, however, worth mentioning that, depending on software, not all students will be able to access Word or Excel documents, so it may be safest to stick to PDFs and webpages.

Website design programs often allow you embed a “pagelet,” or sidebar to your page containing supplemental content, that includes a Google Gadget, such as Google Calendar. Google Calendar can display single-day events or trips, as well as allowing you to fill in several days or weeks for certain activities or subject matter. Maybe you have an ambitious student or two who like nothing more than real time updates of their grade in your class. You may be happy to accommodate them, but imagine how much time you would save if they (and all your other students) could simply check their grades themselves. Your website will allow you to build a grade report for each course that students can check as often or as rarely as they like. Consider listing grades by ID number or password protecting each student’s listing for privacy. Some web design applications allow you to display items in linked lists. This would give you the opportunity to expand on each student’s grade report, without cluttering the page, by including a link to their report details.

Ben Everson’s website for his various courses at Skyline High School. Click on the screenshot to the right to view Mr. Everson’s homepage, including a listing of courses and archive files. Kasey Galligan’s site for Hudson Elementary Schools Integrated Band. Click on the screenshot to the right to see the list of Performing Arts Curriculum at Hudson, along with a glance of all the other great content on Mr. Galligan’s site. A listing of outside links can be helpful regardless of grade level or subject matter. For younger grades, such links can provide parents fun learning activities to do with their children at home. For older grades, the links can include study tips or additional information on assignments. Your outside link list is a chance to valuably supplement your in-class instructional methods with helpful activities or information. As previously mentioned, some web design programs will help you build such a list. This element of your website is mainly for your own benefit, but may come in handy in the future for your fellow teachers as well. Keeping a detailed archive of lesson plans and subject matter is a fantastic organizational step.

Imagine the time, energy, and filing cabinet space that could have been saved if you had done this from the beginning. You can store your lesson plans on your site as Word documents, PDFs, etc., allowing you to download them when need be. You can even password protect the archive page with help from your web host. Welcome to the Sandvox hub, the place for easy and elegant website development for the Macintosh. Welcome to the Karelia Software Hub! Staying in touch with distant loved ones is tougher than ever today. Yes, your church would benefit greatly from a website. Including a brief write-up of your daily schedule helps parents know the right time to get a hold of you, as need be. Of course, conflicts to your posted schedule are bound to happen on nearly a daily basis, but having a general timeframe should cut down on time wasted through “phone tag” exchanges with parents.