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| How-To: Work with Students' Families |
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Setting Up
a Classroom Website to Promote Communication With Parents
Kathy Granas
Parents of students of all ages are rarely satisfied with the amount
of communication they receive from their children's teachers during
the school year. Individual phone calls and e-mails are helpful.
However, for a high school teacher with 150 students, a classroom
website can immediately and continually provide instant information
to all parents.
Teachers may fear that setting up a classroom website is time-consuming
and technically demanding, but this need not be the case. I was pleased
to discover a teacher-friendly website which provides an easy and
practical way for any teacher to set up his/her own classroom website.
Myschoolonline.com
or familyeducation.com
are two addresses that will give you access to the same website, where
you will find everything you need to create your own classroom website.
I spent only one hour at this site when I first logged on, after which
I had my classroom website up and running with a calendar of events,
current list of students' grades (posted with student identification
numbers to ensure confidentiality), homework assignments, and general
information about my classroom.
Maintaining your classroom website is quick, efficient, and easy to
do with the modification tools available to you. I always enjoy adding
more pages and folders to my site. The site even has a feature which
allows your students to work on the site and saves their work until
you OK it for publication.
I had a tremendously positive response from parents when they discovered
how easy it was for them to "peek" into my classroom anytime. If you
can type, you can build a classroom website!
Good Luck! |
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