By Nicomekl elementary's DLCoach, Neha Powar
Being a grade two teacher, I see parents on a daily basis each morning and afternoon. It is nice to be able to touch base and make connections with them; but, I know many parents are working and aren’t able to be there to drop off or pick up their child which hinders how much interaction we have. In order facilitate more communication with parents and give them more access to what we do in our classroom, I wanted to document our classroom learning for parents. I decided to attend a workshop at our school board office that taught “How to Create a Weebly Blog”. It was through this summer seminar session that I came away with tools that helped me in creating my own classroom website and sparked more of a desire to build communication in this way.
Here is the layout of my weebly site:
Weebly is an open and pubic website, so it is important to get parent permission before posting student pictures or information. You can choose to make your blog private by paying a fee through their website.
Creating the website was a fun learning curve. It allowed me to showcase what we do as a class, integrate the technological side of teaching and start something that was really meaningful. Now I am able to update parents on the learning we are doing in class, documenting through photographs and text entries. Our class website also provides a calendar of events, links to online learning websites, provides reminders through a sidebar twitter feed and give parents a place to easily contact me through email. The development of our class website is something that my students have really enjoyed. They become very excited when I tell them that I added something new. I also encourage my students to build communication with their parents and to use the website as a means to talk about their learning in school. I hope you are encouraged to try this for yourself! Visit http://education.weebly.com for more information