From my School Website...

Please read below - this is a post from my school website and in an effort to garner feedback from other sources I am posting the same here (though it is clearly not pertinent to THIS blog...). So, if you get a chance, check out my school page and give me some feedback about it. Thanks!
My Class Web Page Blog Post

Reflections

Well, it sure is hot outside! It's also the time of year that I like to reflect on things that went well and areas where I can improve in my teaching. There are quite a few items on both lists for me!

One of the items that appears on both lists is this very website. There are definitely pros to keeping a website and its ability to source some much needed communication items in a central location. There are also capabilities and organizational issues I would like to improve upon both for myself and for the parents and students that use the site.

One of the areas I feel that I neglected was blogging. Blogging is a great way to communicate with students and parents and I hope to use it more next year - perhaps as a weekly communication tool for areas we worked on that week and some interactive questions for students to answer concerning what we have done in class. I did like using the blog for upcoming events like Halloween and the 100th day, but I'd like to expand upon this to make the questions more open ended - perhaps "What is your favorite Halloween memory?" or "Create an item at home using 100 of something and send me a picture of it - I'll post it on our site!" I feel that the questions I incorporated this year were somewhat limited in how students could respond and therefore not as engaging as I might have liked.

I also loved posting pictures but may need to limit the number of pictures I take next year in the interest of time. I'd like to hierarchy my picture pages rather than link them within one page. It takes too long to load all of those pictures on one page and to scroll down to the bottom. If I were to create one page as was done, I'd do it in reverse order as well so that the most recent pictures would show up at the top of the page - not the bottom. I'd also like to learn how to incorporate a flash slide show of pictures to show on my opening page.

I am happy that I included the EDM home links as I did - several people utilized this through the year. I would like to keep these posted through the summer so that if students need more practice the pages will be readily available to them. I will de-activate them at the beginning of the year though and re-activate them as they are assigned as I did this year. I thought about adding audio directions to these homework assignments, but I'm not sure that's a realistic undertaking for this summer - we'll see and stay tuned! Likewise, posting each week's spelling words seems to have proven helpful for parents, especially those of forgetful students who may have left their pre-test at school.

I would like to continue to post student projects and/or pictures or recordings (podcasts) of them. Podcasting was less time intensive than I thought it might be and I look forward to implementing more of this in the future.

Well - that's it for now...how's this for the longest blog post this year? What I'd really love to hear is feedback from you as a visitor to the site. What aspects have you found helpful? What might be added as a resource in the future? Any feedback is appreciated - thanks!!

Posted by Ellen Zschunke at 9:00 PM

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