Here are some great ideas to bring parents and students to your webpage
Let me start by saying that this idea hit me right at the end of last school year, so it is all about theory and not yet in practice.
Here is the concept. My 8th grade team keeps a lot of documents that we share throughout the year, conference forms, parent contracts, sign in sheets, etc, so we started a shared dropbox where we shared all those forms. No need to give everyone copies, no need to keep them all on files on all of our computers. Then we got to thinking....what if we put other things up that we could all have access to. So I built a webpage for us. I asked my partners what information would we like share: discipline, parent contact information, award information (which kids got which awards), our grade level calendar, attendance issues and content information. Now we can log relevant information into a google form that we all share and have a running record for the year of that information. We can see that certain students are having trouble in multiple classes or that other students are getting awards in all their classes. I password protected it so there are no privacy issues.
1. Using Google Forms:
3. Screencasting lessons - You video your work on your laptop or ipad and upload it one your site. So if a student is absent, instead of coming to you and asking for what they missed, you candirect them to the lesson that you screencasted. Although this takes some time, once you have it, you always have that lesson. Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day.
4. Content - My teaching partners and I created a portal webpage for consumer documents. It included screencasts, the assignments and all the webpages students needed to look at. Students worked at their own pace individually. Since the whole unit was online, we were free to meet with small groups or individuals rather than teach to the whole group.
5. Showcasing student work - If parents know that their child's work will be available to see, they will go to your website to see it. There are lots of ways to do this. You can take video using your smart device and upload it using the drag and drop video button, you can create a table with student's names and urls to their work, you can use QR codes
6. Revolving Content - You are busy! I am busy! There are people who make content that we can embed on our sites that changes. You can find interesting content by looking for widgets. Widgets can be interactive. Here are some examples of widgets: brainpop movie of the day , word of the day. I use these 2 as extra credit. The students write down the word and the definition in their planner and I will stamp it if they show it to me. I give 5 points for each stamp at the end of the trimester. For the brainpop video I have students write a sentence about the content of the movie in their planner for the extra credit. Surfthenet has lots of widgets you can embed into your webpage. It is simple to do, drag the custom html button onto your webpage, go to the page you want to embed, find and copy the embed code and then copy it into your page. Edublogger has quite a list of widgets available for embedding. You can also embed a widget for collecting work. Here's a list of widgets and another
7. Polls - polls are a great way to get people to interact with your site. Weebly has a polldaddy button that you can use under the more tab of elements. You need to set up your free account, but once you do , it saves all the polls you have run. This allows you to use polls from year to year. I have used this at the beginning of the year to find out about what kinds of tech students have at home, or to have students weigh in on current events. I have posted articles and had a poll below to get student's reactions.
Here is the concept. My 8th grade team keeps a lot of documents that we share throughout the year, conference forms, parent contracts, sign in sheets, etc, so we started a shared dropbox where we shared all those forms. No need to give everyone copies, no need to keep them all on files on all of our computers. Then we got to thinking....what if we put other things up that we could all have access to. So I built a webpage for us. I asked my partners what information would we like share: discipline, parent contact information, award information (which kids got which awards), our grade level calendar, attendance issues and content information. Now we can log relevant information into a google form that we all share and have a running record for the year of that information. We can see that certain students are having trouble in multiple classes or that other students are getting awards in all their classes. I password protected it so there are no privacy issues.
1. Using Google Forms:
- For assignments - I embed a google form for my weekly reading log. Students go to the site once a week and log what they read.
- For collecting student information - I have students fill in a beginning of the year questionaire rather than doing one on paper, that way all my student data is in one placee. I do the same with the parents at Back to School Night.
3. Screencasting lessons - You video your work on your laptop or ipad and upload it one your site. So if a student is absent, instead of coming to you and asking for what they missed, you candirect them to the lesson that you screencasted. Although this takes some time, once you have it, you always have that lesson. Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day.
4. Content - My teaching partners and I created a portal webpage for consumer documents. It included screencasts, the assignments and all the webpages students needed to look at. Students worked at their own pace individually. Since the whole unit was online, we were free to meet with small groups or individuals rather than teach to the whole group.
5. Showcasing student work - If parents know that their child's work will be available to see, they will go to your website to see it. There are lots of ways to do this. You can take video using your smart device and upload it using the drag and drop video button, you can create a table with student's names and urls to their work, you can use QR codes
6. Revolving Content - You are busy! I am busy! There are people who make content that we can embed on our sites that changes. You can find interesting content by looking for widgets. Widgets can be interactive. Here are some examples of widgets: brainpop movie of the day , word of the day. I use these 2 as extra credit. The students write down the word and the definition in their planner and I will stamp it if they show it to me. I give 5 points for each stamp at the end of the trimester. For the brainpop video I have students write a sentence about the content of the movie in their planner for the extra credit. Surfthenet has lots of widgets you can embed into your webpage. It is simple to do, drag the custom html button onto your webpage, go to the page you want to embed, find and copy the embed code and then copy it into your page. Edublogger has quite a list of widgets available for embedding. You can also embed a widget for collecting work. Here's a list of widgets and another
7. Polls - polls are a great way to get people to interact with your site. Weebly has a polldaddy button that you can use under the more tab of elements. You need to set up your free account, but once you do , it saves all the polls you have run. This allows you to use polls from year to year. I have used this at the beginning of the year to find out about what kinds of tech students have at home, or to have students weigh in on current events. I have posted articles and had a poll below to get student's reactions.
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