My Weebly teacher website was a little more of a challenge than I was expecting. I found that Weebly's formatting was neither very easy to use or customizable; I had trouble placing text and images where I wanted them and I did not like that I could not preview how my page would look to visitors before publishing. I would have liked to move and arrange my text boxes and images, as they are now things are not very tight looking (especially my 'about me' page. The next time I create a teacher website I will likely explore the Google option.
Creating a website that is easy to navigate and visually appealing proved to be a difficult task, but this practice certainly helped me understand how a good teacher website might function. In the future, I want to be able to use my website to communicate with both teachers and students. I want to be able to use a blog format to post classroom information and newsletters to parents, and on another page I would like to have a space for assignments, podcasts and videos that appear on a page in like a blog; I could use this in a flipped classroom model. Having a space with all this information would be great for studying and it also keeps parents up to date on what is happening in class. My research paper was on the flipped classroom (see my blog post) and one important point I made was that parents liked the flipped model because they were able to view lecture posts with their children and help them with their homework; seems like a great way to maximize my class time and get parents more involved in the learning process. Beyond that utility, I had not planned any other pages to be apart of my site, but I will definitely be incorporating a fun homepage with class info and course goals and an 'about me' page.
Eric, I definitely agree with you when it comes to the ability to customizing on Weebly! I liked my layout when I first began creating my website but then I wanted to delete a box that was there but there was no way to move it/delete it! I found it a little strange that we could not view our websites before publishing them. When I use this for real, I will be updating the website often but what if a parent views it between edits?! I do not like the posibility of this happening.
ReplyDeleteI definitely think that using a website to interact with one's students and the parents of those students is brillant! On my website, I created pages for different grade levels (because I'm art ed and I teach different grade levels). I feel that by adding some fun to a website is important for every age and I feel like it's great that you are considering that now!