As I was completeing the Homepage evaluation assignment, I was overwhelmed and amazed at the variety of homepages there were online. I found some that were very plain in their layout and the information they included. Some only had a one page summary about the class and a short bio of the teacher and that was all. A couple I thought expressed the teacher's personal agenda. One I read included a very social activist message in it's construction and in the language used by the teacher. Two other pages included more about the teacher's family, including pictures, than links and resources for their students or the community they work in.
I was most impressed by the homepages created by Early Childhood/Elementary Educators. These homepages seemed to include a lot of information. Many of these pages included information for the district, PTO, and resources as well as classroom information and updates. These pages were colorful and full of energy. I think of all of the homepages I viewed, only was hurting my vision because as the mouse moved, the cursor on the screen had the letter a trailing behind it and it was too busy in it's construction.
I learned a lot from evaluating other homepages and I have gotten good ideas on how to improve my homepage.
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I also feel that the homepage assignment was very helpful. I have never designed my own homepage and now feel more confident in doing so. I actually outlined my ideas for a site prior to looking at others, and I am now revisiting my plan. I need to think about ways to add professional information about myself, as well as samples of students' work.
ReplyDeleteI also found that elementary teachers had more colorful informative homepages. However, there may have been a purpose to this. Younger students usually need more reminders when it comes to homework, spelling lists, classrom activities, etc. because they are not as independent as older children. Also, I wonder if some of the middle and high school websites have pages available for each teacher a student has according to subject area. The cute pages of elementary teachers are designed to cater to their young readers and their parents. Older students may prefer to read a more grown-up business-like page.
What I found most impressive was the number of sites in which teachers are updating their information on a weekly basis. This must be very time consuming! Throughout my "tour" of sites I kept saying to myself, "Wow!" "These teachers are so committed to education." My goal is to set high expections for myself and design a homepage comparable to some of the oustanding ones I've seen.
I agree that the classroom homepage evaluation was worthwhile. As teachers, it is often difficult to find the time to seek out new information and reflect on its application to our own situation due to all of the obligations we have in our profession. I was amazed at the quality of many of the websites I found. Just looking through them sparked my own thinking as to how I might adjust some of the good ideas to meet the needs of my students and the topics in our curriculum. Earlier this week, I shared a few of the sites with my fellow teammates. We decided to try some of the ideas presented on one of the sites for a mini mystery unit within our larger unit of reading in a series. We found charts, vocabulary, comprehension strategy lesson ideas, and even detective badges for the students. It all looks wonderful! Think about all of the time saved by not having to reinvent the wheel.
ReplyDeleteI just left an afternoon professional development session where we were discussing small group instruction. We talked about the need for handy suggestions for teachers to try with our at-risk students to ensure that our small group instruction is based on scientific research for the RTI model we are starting to implement. With five elementary schools, we have a plethora of solid ideas for intervention to meet the needs of individual students. We talked about a way to share these across the district, again to save ourselves from reinventing the wheel. This is another advantage of being wired to the Internet and Intranet. My kids will enjoy not having to stop in Danbury to go the Teacher –Parent Store anymore.