Blog Journal 6
For this blog, we were instructed to infiltrate a teacher's website and analyze it. Like Jason Borne in Mission Impossible, I made my way to the Leon High School faculty website page and found myself in a new world, the world of "Ms. Crooks Classroom". This website was great as it gave me ideas for my website which I will eventually make and had an easy-to-use format that made navigation easy. The website is completely made up of hyperlinks, you click on one to get you to the next page, and so on. This website consisted of different information about World History Honors, US History Honors, AP Research, Contact Information, and more all accessible to both students and parents. The two history-based pages contained different outlines and information for the units while to contact page provided a way to better access the instructor. Overall a good website with easy usage. Not that it's necessarily my place but I give the site a 7/10 because I found it dull.
I think that teachers who don't use technology in the classroom such as a class website are missing out on a resource that is so powerful. As an educator, I plan to have a very thorough website containing answers to any questions a student might have. For example, my website would follow the days in class so if we had a warmup, read two passages, and watched a video all of that would be on the website for whatever date it may be. This makes it so students can follow along and see what's up ahead. Access to the information also becomes a skeleton of the class as it would be what we did. This is the beauty of the website, it is able to connect those who may not be there. A specific productivity tool that I will use as a teacher would be an interactive calendar. Students would all have their own customizable calendar that would display due dates, assignments, etc. and all of this would be available to put on the calendar at the student's discretion. They would also be able to add things to the calendar per se if they wanted to block out time to study.
As I had stated before, PB Works was new to me and at first, I did not like the format and at times found it difficult to use. As I became more comfortable with the site and did portfolio-based assignments I came to like how easy it was to post. In a scenario where I was a K-12 teacher, I would want to be an 11th-grade history teacher. Using a wiki format with students of this age can get them more involved in the work that they are doing. I believe that a tool to freely share would engage students in a way that the classroom setting cannot do. Some might say that the screen gives the student a place to hide but I almost see that as positive. A student who might not be comfortable enough to share in class might be a great writer and the wiki can show that. Furthermore, as I have stated, the wiki format gives way to new and unique resources that a student may find. These resources might not be your prototypical articles and instead videos from a creator the students like on the subject. Overall, wikis can create a more effective classroom.
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