Web+Pages+in+the+Classroom

=__Web Pages in the Classroom__=

This is where we will store information on using web pages in the classroom--such as what kind of information works, what doesn’t, and other issues like the safety of the students and the limitations the schools place upon the various web pages. There is also a section on Front Page, the editing software. Using Front Page, making a webpage can be surprisingly simple. It's a very good classroom tool, and it's also easy to use!

Webpages can be a great asset to the classroom. A good free tool for teachers to use is [|www.schoolnotes.com]. This site allows teachers to create a homepage for free. When teachers create websites, they should stay current on updating material--including links on the webpage. This ensures that their web page offers clarification instead of confusion. Updating links helps deter boredom for students as well.

Class websites are a great way to communicate with parents. Not every parent has the time to make a trip to the school, but many can take 10 minutes to look on the web page to see what is going on in their child’s classroom. All parents have to do is go to the website, type in the zip code for the school district, and then search for the teacher's name.

With technology becoming increasingly prevalent in education, it is important for teachers to know and use what is on the web. There is a mass of helpful information, ideas, and resources that could enhance teaching and learning. As with anything else, you have to take the good with the bad. There are always issues that come along with using the web. You have to make sure that the sites you use and recommend are credible and of good quality. It is helpful to keep an ongoing list of sites that you know might be useful and credible. You also have to consider safety. The information that you release on the web should be limited to certain viewers. If teachers have students submit or access things online, they should ensure that only the teacher, classmates, parents, etc. could view that information. This provides everyone with a sense of safety, freedom, and comfort. Often schools block and/or restrict certain websites from being viewed on the schools computers. This is a way to monitor and control what students are looking through in order to ensure their safety while on the Internet. As long as these issues are addressed, it is a good thing to implement technology in the classroom. That is how students are learning and working today.

Teachers should keep up with the times. The web is something different for students to learn from. However, when the students are using the web in the classroom, the teacher should make sure the students are on task rather than checking their e-mail or messaging their friends, etc. Many of the websites that I am familiar with are geared towards English. However, some recommendations for all educators are: http://turnitin.com/static/home.html (a site to check for plagiarism), http://www.teach-nology.com/, and [|http://www.educationworld.com/.]

This being said, webpages provide teachers with a link to their students' "real lives" and interests. Students will be very motivated to complete a lesson that incorporates "MySpace" or "Facebook" type components. Don't miss out on this opportunity to get your students more interested in learning and in finding new ways to meet lesson objectives. At the same time, make sure your school, students, and parents are comfortable with you incorporating social networking sites into the classroom. As danah boyd discussed, often these sites recreate social segregation. Therefore, teachers should use caution when asking their students to "Friend" other individuals. It may be uncomfortable for students to feel forced to Friend their teachers or certain classmates.

When using hyperlinks, be careful to double-check the links in order to make sure they work correctly. When linking e-mail addresses, use the e-mail address option. It is beneficial to also use the script tip so the viewers know who is the person to whom they are sending their e-mails. The link will not function on the Front Page format. To make sure they work properly open a web preview (ex. Internet Explorer) and click the link, then save the web page.

First, be very careful with what you read on the Internet. A lot of sites contain bogus material and cannot be accredited to an author. Hints to keep you out of this kind of messy situation are websites that end in “.edu” or “.org”. These sites are generally owned and managed by an educational institution or a nationally recognized foundation or organization. However, you need to be sure to check the credibility of the website before using it. The website [|www.martinlutherking.org] appears to be professional, but even my students noticed something fishy about it during the evaluation we did in class. It turns out that it is owned and run by a white pride group.

Also, be aware of search engines and how simple words that mean no harm can be twisted into pornographic material. As teachers we need to know what our students will find when we ask them to search something on the web. Always make sure the Safe Search is turned on when using Yahoo or any other kind of search engine to make sure such material doesn’t filter through when searching for something. It would be in a teachers best interest to already have explored a website. Teachers need to have a good sense of protection when it comes to letting the students loose on the web to research. It is an amazing tool, but using it without responsibility can get the teacher and student in trouble.

I think websites can be very useful when giving information and reaching parents. The sites need to remain up to date and not rely on students to transfer information. Its a way parents can be up to date 24/7 even when you are sleeping.

When it comes to transferring your PowerPoint presentation to a webpage, be sure to drag both files over. An easy way to do this is to simply save your Power Point to the desktop and drag both icons into the folder.

I think it is a great idea for teachers to have their own home pages in order for students and parents to be able to be "in the know" of what is going on in class. However, I’m not sure how many people actually look at them. Personally, I’m more interested in how much lunch money my son has left and his attendance record. I don’t think I have even been on his teachers’ homepage once this school year. I do like the idea of posting the homework up, that way no student can come back and say they didn’t know what the assignment was.

Web pages are a great way to extend the classroom into a student's every day life. Most of our students are more tech savvy than many of us could ever hope to be. They use the internet for a lot of things in their lives including socializing, entertainment, and even learning! (Amazing, I know!) Providing pre-reviewed links for students on a web page that you maintain is a great way to provide students with safe links that can be used for research among many other things. One challenge many students face while trying to find research on the internet is trying to decipher whether what they find is useful and factual or not.

I believe a homepage would be very useful if a student is sick and must miss a lot of school. Homework assignments and activities can be placed on the site to help the student to keep up. It can also be used as a tool for a struggling student to have fun activities that enhance learning. I also like to have a place to put links for students to access. This can give them a place to play games related to the class curriculum. I could also link the students to the Merriam-Webster dictionary website. This website has audio so the student can hear how a word is pronounced correctly. The web page can be a place to put activities for use in the classroom if computers are available. Even if the classroom only has one computer, the homepage can have access to games. The teacher can use these games as a reward. As time goes on, I’m sure we can find a lot of uses for our own web pages. To keep our web pages as useful as possible, we should continue to develop them and use them to approach the classroom and material in new ways over time.

What do we do if our school doesn't have a homepage for the district? Should we keep a webpage up just for our classes in order for our students to benefit? I think this is an excellent opportunity to let our students help us. We can get the students' input as well as actual HELP on the webpage--if we decide to create one for our class. Odds are, the students will know just as much as we do about webpages and what they find appealing while on the internet. Using their input and guidance can be a great asset later on.

A homepage could also be helpful for a Physical Education teacher. This could be used to show what a student missed that day in class, or they could review certain techniques or skills. This way, the student could practice these skills at home if they wanted to. If this was my class website, I would make sure to have videos on the website that the students could watch so that they could refer to these videos if they wanted. Physical Education teacher homepages could also be a good place to provide information concerning student health and growth. I think that Physical Education teacher needs to have a homepage connected to the school's webpage. Physical Education is a content area in schools that parents aren't usually involved with. They simply see a grade at the end of the year (and probably get very upset if they see a bad grade and don't know where it came from). Anyways, it would be beneficial if the PE teacher had a link for parents to see what their student's are doing each week and their student's grades. They can also have a certain account for each child where they put feedback of skills testing or videos of the child. This would be a great tool for middle and high school PE teachers as far as non-dresses go.

Web pages in PE can be a useful tool. Students can use the website to access their grades and know what is going on that week in PE. It can inform/remind students that they need to bring sweatshirts to class because they will be outside that day, or to bring their swim suits and towels for the swimming unit. Also this can be good for parents to they know what it going on in class so they can help their child be prepared. Also it would be fun to put weekly sports facts/game results on the website so students can stay current on sport news.

I think that teachers having their own websites could do nothing but help the parents. Sure, not everyone will use it to their full Potential, but that is the parents prerogative and by giving the parents and students both access to all of the homework assignments, and class notes if the technology is available, there is no reason for either a student or a parent to feel uninformed. I think it is really important that the parents have access to contact the teacher, whether it be an email address or another form of contact, I think that it is something every parents, and again student, should be able to do. I think that having the students blog or have an open forum of some kind is an interesting idea, but I am just afraid that it would be misused and potentially detrimental to the teacher or a particular student. When people are able to make comments anonymously, they can become vicious. I just think that with all the different stories and news reports available these days there would have to be some sort of restrictions on what the students are allowed to discuss and not discuss. I just think that it would be too easy for something to go badly, so I am not sure that I would feel completely comfortable giving my classes a place to openly discuss. It may have to be a class by class basis that the forum or blog is opened for the students.

Bridging the gap between teacher and parent is vital to building the bridge between teacher and student. It seems that websites are a great means to do that. Having a place for teacher, parent, and student interaction when a place is not even needed is almost to good to be true. Though it's not face to face, this interaction, such as on a class blog, can help teachers, parents, and students stay informed and feel like they are taking more of an active role in the class. However, there would need to be strict consequences to posting blogs about irrelevant, harmful, degrading, or discriminating content.

I also agree that web pages help any teacher and are most valuable to them. I can't tell you how many students would stay up to date with their schoolwork and tests. A teacher can have another type of reassurance and not have the student say, "Well I don't remember". The teacher can tell that student 1) I wrote up on the assignment board and 2) It is posted on our class website. However one of the most difficult things in creating a website is not only making sure all the links work but, also keeping the website up to date. As a current undergraduate student at SEMO, I can't tell you how much it upsets me to see links on teacher's websites not working. But, the thing that upsets me more is when the student will point it out to the teacher and the teacher says they already fixed it. Websites are a critical component of success in the classroom because technology is growing everyday and education needs to grow with it as well.

But teachers will need to remember that not every student has access to technology at home. In many rural areas students only have internet at school because either internet is not offered in their area or it cost to much for their parents to budget in. So teachers do not need to rely on the fact the the students parents are looking up the class informtion on the internet.

** __FRONT PAGE__ **


 * You really have to pay attention to web links, websites, and how to transfer data from the Internet to your Front Page**. Front Page is an easy, organized, web-based program that helps students enhance research skills, complete web-based activities, and have access to your own professional homepage. Front Page is the key to making a professional homepage that everyone can view. The main difficulty you will have is linking from page to page. The easiest way to do this is to create a link for every page on your homepage while keeping a link to your homepage on every other page. Sounds easy right?!?! Well, one way to accomplish this more simply is to create all the links you need on one page and attach them. Then copy this list of active links to the other pages. They should all work. Although Frontpage is becoming a little outdated, it is remarkably easy to navigate through. Remember to edit on the student server, not from you flash drive or home computer. If you edit or change things from your home computer or flash drive, it will be only saved to that, not the server where other people view the site. The way to make sure you have saved it in the right place is if you had to enter your Southeast key to view the page.

When creating a webpage in Front Page, it is important to put everything in a table. It helps to keep your text and pictures in place.

If you wish to make your the lines of your tables transparent you just adjust the border size to zero and PRESTO! the lines are gone.

Another front Page tip is that any time you have made changes on the page you are working on, there will be a tab at the top with an asterisk. If there is an asterisk this means that you have made changes that have not been saved.

Another front page tip is that you have to save each page, you cannot just save one page and save everything that you are doing. Front page tutorial available at http://www.internet4classrooms.com/on-line2.htm Helpful tips for using Front page available at []

I found a great webpage for the classroom at the site schoolnotes.com where teachers can post the notes for each day directly on the site. This is a great tool for teachers to keep parents updated on what is going on in the classroom, for students who missed class that day or didn't copy down all the notes, or for students who need a little extra help or review of the material at home. Teachers could also post the daily assignments on this website that corresponding to the material covered in the notes.

I think a class webpage is a great tool for students and parents. I love the class websites in all my college classes. Students can find find assignments, expectations, grades, and policies all there. I think it is important, however, teachers to keep their sites updated frequently so students can have the correct information posted. I also think the website could also have a forum for students to communicate about homework or questions they have, or for parents to be able to get in contact with the teacher about their concerns

All of my high school English teachers really discouraged students from using sparknotes.com or any of the cliff note pamphlets but when I entered college teachers were telling students to go to sparknotes and even using the tool in the classroom. "No Fear Shakespeare" was shone in several classes even when Shakespeare was not part of the curriculum. The "everyday wording" made the text really easy to understand and even helped build vocabulary. I think that linking the page to a class website would help students who are lost in their homework and do not have any one to ask.

I think having a webpage is a great tool to invest in. As a PE teacher, I can have a class page which will actually be a smart thing to have. I would have contact information (email) and that way my students will be able to contact me if they have questions, concerns, etc. I would also have assignments on the webpage. That way if a student misses class, they dont fall behind in my class. I will have videos of skill techniques so the students are able to see how a skill is supposed to look. I could have a page for the parents and they can see what the class is doing, how the class is doing, what we will be doing, etc. This way the parents can track their child's progress. I think webpages are a great way to also provide links to informational sites on topics we are covering.

As a music educator, an emphasis on creativity is often stressed. Creating websites is surprisingly easy, even for technology-ignorant people. Using tools such as SharePoint and FrontPage are extremely helpful tools and the hardest part is figuring out the programs and all the options that are available to the user. Students, teachers, parents, and the community can all benefit from a class webpage. It is a way of communication and expression from the teacher to the parents, students, community, and even other teachers. Students can know what is expected of them at all times and all they need is access to a computer or the Internet. Another amazing feature is that the pages can be updated and edited and once you've made one webpage all of the rest are easy and can be transmitted and used for other things.



__**Share Point **__
Class webpages are becoming more important since we live in a digital age. Having a class website to inform parents and students outside of the classroom helps to promote education and content outside of the confines of the classroom. A helpful Tutorial for Share Point Designer can be found on the Microsoft Website at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA102199841033.aspx Not all Microsoft Office packages include Share Point Designer, the above web address has the program available for a 60 day trial. Share Point Designer 2007 allows you to make changes in layout to your entire site by editing the master page. Share Point has some disadvantages, such as, the drag feature does not work for moving text.
 * Also avoid using the tab key when working in Share Point, because hitting tab will cause text and images on page to jumble or disappear.

The difficulty some users have when moving to SharePoint (or any website design program for that matter) is that unlike a document or picture file, SharePoint is taking what you designed and breaking it down into the HTML code that every computer has to read. This way, instead of uploading each page as another giant image, you are downloading directions that tell your computer how to rebuild the page on your computer at home (imagine how long it would take to load a website if every page was a PDF file!). Since the text requires a lot less data than a picture would, you are getting the page brought to in the fastest way possible. On the downside, visual spacing and layout become second-seat, because if the code doesn't tell the computers to space the page in a certain way, it won't. As a result, how you view the web page in Share Point, may not be how it appears when you access the actual website.

I agree that web pages are a great asset to any teacher. It helps convey information all the time even when the teacher is not there to answer questions. It is also a good way to organize information about the classes. This aside I found a couple problems with Share Point. The main problem that I had was that the editing tools used were very complex and quite confusing. I have been talking to some people that have used Front Page in the past and they have said that it is much easier than Share Point because the complicated editing tools are hidden so they do not get in your way.

The most difficult part of using Sharepoint, in my opinion, was making sure that the links showed the page that you wanted. For instance, I had a link from each of my individual pages back to my main homepage. Well, I did some pretty radical changes to the homepage but it would still show the "old" homepage when I clicked on the link that would lead me back to it. I'm not sure if I ever figured this out but it had something to do showing the last saved change before it was linked-very confusing!

Also, you may experience difficulty when trying to link to an existing document. Sometimes you must say the item to the desk top and then drag it into the share point document in order for it to link properly. You must also make sure that you save the file in a way that will allow all students to have access to them. If you create a document using a less common program such as Raptivity, Smart board Notebook, or Inspiration, you may need to save the item in a different form or export it to another program such as powerpoint, which is more common program on students' personal computers. I really enjoyed this assignment. When it comes to designing things like we had to do with sharepoint I tend to get carried away with the creative side of things and often loose track of time. I did get the webquest and webpage done on time however. I thought the program was a little hard to work with though. At times I had problems getting things to lay how I wanted them. I couldn't always space things how I wanted and had problems with aligning things also. Maybe I just needed more time with the program or possibly there is a better program available. Either way, I think having the knowledge to create a web quest and website will be very useful in the classroom.

Web pages can be super fun and helpful for any teacher to have. By having a web page, students, parents, and other teachers can access information posted by me. I feel that a web page is useful in that teachers can share parents and students with information about them, what will be learned during the semester, etc. It is also a fun thing for students to do as well. Projects can be a lot more fun if say the students are to make a web page. Using sharepoint can also be somewhat confusing, but once you play around on the program it gets a lot easier! It's also a way to get creative!

Although I have not worked with any other Web page software, I found SharePoint to be very user friendly and easy to get around. At first I did have a little trouble getting good backgrounds until I found sites that offered backgrounds that were compatible with Share Point.

Share Point is a very easy program to use. I was a bit worried because I had never made a web page before, but once I got started, my page came together very quickly. I appreciated that the program was easy to use. Another plus to the program was that I could download it for free from the Microsoft Live website, so it was nice that I did not need to spend a lot of money to get the program especially since it is really hard to purchase programs on a teacher's salary.

I have used both Share Point and Free Webs to create web pages. Free Webs is nice because it has several templates already made for an individual to use so that it does not take time to start from scratch. The text does not get jumbled like it does on Share Point. Free Webs is just easier to use but the Adds make it very annoying to search. Free Webs also does not allow you to be creative. You cannot make a template like you can in Share Point. If you have an idea in your head, use Share Point and keep the freedom.