Educational Merits for Classroom Site

First, I am sorry for not posting sooner, I have had two very sick boys home the past three days, one at the ER and other just sick. So again I am sorry for not posting sooner…

I believe it is very important for a classroom teacher to maintain a classroom web site. I am not in a full classroom yet, I just started co-teaching a writing class. However, I am noticing that many of my students are on the internet chatting and “surfing”, I think it would be a great idea to get their minds working on a web site they design and can help maintain. Perhaps it can get their creative writing flowing.

I found an article: Using a classroom webpage to communicate with parents (http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/689). This article was great, it was about a first-grade teacher who created a webpage to communicate with the student’s parents.

The Website consisted of: welcoming statement including contact information and times that she checks email each day.
A link to her daily summaries page. The news for each day is posted in different fonts and/or colors and replaced daily with the corresponding weekday. For example, on the day I visited Kathleen’s class, she erased the previous week’s text for Monday, March 10 and wrote the date and news for Monday, March 17. The previous week’s Tuesday through Friday summaries remained on the site to be changed as the week progressed.
Each Monday, Kathleen sends home a weekly newsletter with students. This newsletter is also posted each week on the site. Through the newsletter, Kathleen sends information about curricular units, upcoming field trips, homework, and/or requests for parent volunteers.
At the beginning of each school year, all parents in Kathleen’s classroom are provided with a handbook outlining school policies and classroom procedures. Throughout the year, parents can access the handbook through Kathleen’s site. As the grade level chair, Kathleen is responsible for selecting appropriate sites to be included on all the first grade teachers’ classroom pages. Students and parents are encouraged to email sites to her for inclusion in this section.
Another section of the site includes pictures of students and samples of student writing. (Students’ last names are never used, only initials. Some parents have also requested that their children’s first names not be used.)
This website was a great way to get parent’s involved in their children’s day and classroom. This would be great if all grades were this enthusiastic about their teaching and the children’s learning.
I found a website: http://www.ehow.com/how_4531502_creating-website-teachers.html, which discusses and gives detail on how to create a website for teachers, it is quite informative.