Purpose:
One of the difficulties my team has experienced over the past two years has been increased complaints from parents that they don't know what's happening in their student's lives on a daily basis.  The school send home a monthly newsletter in the mail, but many parents don't feel it's enough.  In searching for a way to help parents stay involved, the idea for a team web site emerged.  We also felt that a web site could be an excellent resource for our students.

Planning:
I met with my team members to discuss what we would like to do at the beginning of this undertaking.  None of us have ever created or maintained a web site before, so we agreed to keep it simple.  We also felt that many of our parents might be more comfortable with simplicity.

To that end, we agreed to place all daily homework on a single page.  Major projects assignments would also go on that page with greater explanations on that teacher's individual page.  Links would be provided to make it easy for parent's to obtain the information on the project.

The calendar page will be used for deadlines for major projects, field trips and other deadlines, as well as school information.

The supply page can be accessed at any time throughout the year so that parents can keep up on the items their students need.

There will also be a newsletter and a place to feature student work so that we can share some of the things that happen each week with parents.  We continue to have ongoing discussions on how to best accomplish this safely.

Each teacher will design their own page.  I will be helping them, as none of them have done this before, but all are willing to try.

We also agreed to provide articles for parents on gifted education and a site for easily accessed resourcs for the students.  We plan on adding to these as the year progresses.

I placed a counter on the main page to give us an idea about the level of usage, but I also intend to survey the parents and students during the year as to the usefulness of the site.

The site can be accessed at:
      http://students.ed.uiuc/edu/ljgriffi/project/7g.html