6 Classroom Websites, Productivity Technology, and Web Evaluations

In my search for a classroom website I stumbled upon this amazing site created by a teacher named Brandy Carter. Mrs. Carter is a fifth grade teacher at Youngsville Middle School. I am in complete awe of the aesthetics of the web page and how detailed it is. It has resources to help students improve in each subject area, links to educational games, and even internet safely rules. She has posted an online memory book of pictures for each year that she has been teaching and of the activities that the students participated in that year. I know the students’ parents have signed a release form to allow pictures of the students to be posted but I think if I was a parent I would rather have pictures and information such as a daily schedule to be password protected. Every day on the news there is a story to be told about an online predator targeting children and I would rather not have strangers be able to publicly view where my child is at every moment while they are at school.

According to the podcast, productivity is defined as things that help you complete everyday tasks more effectively and efficiently. The podcast mentions using Diigo, which I wrote about in my last blog post, as a productivity tool. Diigo lets users annotate websites and online documents and keeps them organized for future reference. Teachers often use classroom management software which is defined in chapter 7 of the textbook as "off-the-shelf or customized software written for educators to help them manage school and classroom tasks". As I mentioned in class today, a productivity tool I would like to use in my future classroom is the Focus Time app. We all know just how short a student's attention span can be. This app breaks up the day into increments of 25 minutes of focus time and 5 minutes of break time. During that break time teachers can keep students engaged through discussions about the lesson or they can participate in a fun GoNoodle activity, it doesn't have to be just idle time of the students sitting there. By giving students a break it redirects their attention from the tedious nature that can come out of reading and focusing on one topic for a long period of time.

From the Web Resource Evaluation I learned a lot about the availability of resources within Google. I was completely unaware that I could use my Gmail account to so easily craft a website. I loved how easy it made collaborating with classmates. It took the frustration of one person completing the majority of the assignment out of the group project which was wonderful. That is what I hate about group projects, there is always an uneven amount of effort among the group but everyone reaps the benefits of the grade and the wiki eliminated that. I enjoyed the group of girls that I worked with and I think we all contributed well to the assignment. When we first began the assignment, honestly, I was dreading it. It seemed like it was going to be so in-depth because we had to create the website before we even began working but it turned out to be a breeze. There really is not anything that I disliked about it. I would love to use this resource in the future to better facilitate collaboration and tech skills between my students.