Class Website

Our current assignment is to create a faux class website. So far I do not exactly know how the website can actually be used inside the classroom. I do think it could be a valuable tool outside for parents and students.

One thing that could effect learning would be if you could upload homework onto your site, in case a child was out for the day and needed to know what happened. That does sound like a great deal of work for the teacher though, not only teaching during the day, planning lessons at all hours, but also playing the role of web-master.

Of course, many of the pages on the site could be left unchanged for longer periods (the teaching philosophy, the "about me," or maybe the home page). Many would need to be constantly updated though, if you were going to keep it very current with daily happenings and homeowrk and such.

I know some people are going so far as to have a school lunch calendar on their page. I know this would address the concerns of Milhouse's father Kirk from "The Simpsons" who remarked, "I don't like the idea of Milhouse having two spaghetti meals in one day." This way parents could plan accordingly.

Older grades could really benefit from the idea though. For instance my mother is an eighth grade english teacher and she's doing a website for her class. I think she plans to include rubrics and information about specific projects/assigments that she repeats with each class- so she could leave the initial information essentially unchanged and update the due dates as needed.