blog@geibtechforlearning

The first two weeks of school, I thought we were just required to put a web site on the Internet. Therefore, the first two weeks, the focus of my web site was going to be to provide information to the parents. After class last week, I realized we needed to develop an interactive web site that our students would be able to utilize. After learning how to create a blog in class last week, I decided to incorporate a daily blog into my curriculum. I created a blog over the weekend, and my students posted to it today for the first time. The focus of the daily blog is going to be language arts. If you would like to see a representation of my blogs, go to my website at http://www.adamssharks.com/blog. Please consider I only have one student who is proficient, and the rest are either far below basic or below basic. I feel integrating a daily blog into my curriculum will enable me to become a better teacher, because my students were really motivated today to answer the question in the blog. I was really excited about bringing this new technology to them today, and they all responded to the best of their ability. I hope I see some growth in their postings as the year progresses. I emailed all the students who gave me a real email address, and told them what I enjoyed about their posting. I hope this additional effort on my part will motivate them to improve their language arts skills.

I believe the big idea of my website will be informational and aimed for a family experience for my students. I want to make my website accessible for my kindergarteners, so they can have fun and go to some safe websites. I also want to have links to point parents in the right direction for information to help their kids. I want to be able to have an area for parents to contact me and post questions or concerns but have not yet decided how I want to set this up, e-mail, blog or both. I also want to have links to other district sites. I really want to set up an area where parents can sign up to help, I want to post a calendar and if parents want to help they can sign up right there. In other words I really just want to make this site informational at first.

At this time my website is mostly for myself. I want to organize my links to standards, post some information about core subjects such as English Language Arts and Math. Later I want to incorporate information for the parents. At the beginning of the school year I can direct them to my web site to find information about my expectations, projects, daily work, homework or any other useful information. These are long-term goals that I will work on throughout the rest of this year and summer. I hope to have this information on my web site by the beginning of next year. As far as a project for this class. I am thinking about adding a section for a scavenger hunt. The students could read the assignment with the requirements. Then they could click on a link to the web site indicated. There they would follow directions and find information within the web site.

I definitely think that a web presence is going to help my teaching. I know that I am just scratching the surface in this class, as I explore bulletin boards, wikis, Photoshop and Dreamweaver (nothing like spreading yourself thin). My goal is to have a media-rich site that enables students to learn the language while learning about the culture. For a concrete example of what I mean, see http://www.colby.edu/~bknelson/exercises/ and explore just one of those areas in the column to the left. This professor has her act together! What is comforting, however, is that I have watched her site growing month by month for some time now, which means that it “was not built in a day” and that it will take me some time to get where I want to be.

Students need the three R’s in their education: rigor, relationship, and relevance. It is the latter of the aforementioned that I hope my webpage will achieve through sound clips and listening activities, videos of real people in real situations, music, art, connections with students around the world (using Skype and/or bulletin boards eventually) and connections with their peers in their classes through wikis. There are SO many things that I want to do now!

At this point, I see my focus splitting in two (does that mean I am going cross-eyed?): a functional, practical bulletin board and wiki site for my students. I see these as valuable communication and collaboration tools.

Right now I see my website as a way of both organizing myself and as a resource for students in Drama. I have found it to be fatiguing and energizing at the same time. I have started writing the unit for Midsummer Night’s Dream on the agenda—now I need to flesh it out with links to downloads. I am also working on a couple of Inspriations to post to the site that will help students keep in mind a “who’s who” and a place for them to write down important quotes. I have also started a “Class Policies” page that will apply to all students—in writing, all the time.
I am also starting to add to the Tech Lit 1 curriculum—all assignments for that class are maintained on Conni Carr’s webpage—I would like to add a bulletin board for topics that we have been doing Socratic Seminars on to add an interactive piece.
All in all, the big picture for me is:
1. to have a site that helps me with accountability
2. to continue to grow as a teacher
3. to create an interactive resource for students that will move them forward with their learning in a relevant, immediate way.

I like the creative range, the “custom curriculum” component a website allows.

There are many important reasons in having a web page at this point in my career. The first is the organization of digital teaching files which are stored and accessed online.
My second reason for building a web page is the access I give to others to see into what I hold to be meaningful in teaching subjects.
Most importantly the web page gives me a process to be creative and build my own style of teaching with immediate results that will keep me communicating with students and their families. Best of all this information will be available to me and others without my need to carry around a computer. Even a laptop gets heavy when it is carried around daily with the additional burden of theft.

The "Big Idea" in my web page will be the gathering of digital media for learning. This is why I copied "tech for learning" in the URL from Rich. These words focus the purpose in building a web page instead of organizing a file cabinet in an educational
environment. There will be many digital files available and unique to help and support all things educational.
My focus at this point is to organize while searching out these digital files for a creative,"thoughtless" webpage for users.