By Tim Pletcher

Description:

I plan on making a web page that my classes will be able to utilize both in and out of school. This web page will serve as a vital component to my classroom next year because I envision it being a major part of the curriculum. There will be several components to the web site; however, I have three main objectives I would like to address through the web site.

Objectives:

ü The first objective is to serve as a means for communication between the students, their parents, and me. On the page I have my e-mail address listed and linked. I have found in the past that sometimes it is difficult to contact parents or vice versa via the phone. Nothing can be more frustrating than a game of phone tag. Hopefully, this alternate means of communication will assist in making contact or responding to concerns more efficient and timely.

ü The next objective is to attempt to keep the students and myself more organized and up to date on the course and curriculum. For each section I teach, I will post a syllabus for those classes. By publishing a syllabus that students can access at anytime will assist them, I hope, with staying on task and knowing exactly when things are assigned and due. Again, since this can be accessed at home, if a student is absent they will know what that day’s assignments were. Also, he or she may e-mail me for greater details of the assignments for that particular day.

ü Finally, the third objective is to neatly catalog a list of links to other web sites I plan to use in class throughout the school year. If I can assemble these links on my site, it would be more efficient than book marking the several links I plan to use on each computer in the lab; we would only need to bookmark my page. Therefore, each time my class goes to the lab for anything other than simple word processing, we can just jump to my page. The links I have collected are to sites we will use to complete on line activities, chat among ourselves, other classes, and/or other schools, do research, and instruction.

The Product:

Thus far, my web page is pretty rudimentary due to the fact that I am a novice web page architect, but that is fine since I want the site to be simple and user-friendly. In addition, I do not have my syllabi posted yet because I still do not know which sections I will be teaching at my new school, so I just listed the three different sections I taught last year to get an idea of what the site would look like with those links in there. As of this moment, I have eight links listed, but I have a ton of other sites book marked on my browser to scrutinize more closely later; I may end up listing even more if I decide I would like to use them. I strongly recommend the PBS web site as well as ePALS; there are some really interesting things on each of those sites I think you folks would enjoy. Also before I go, if anyone would be interested in trying to coordinate a chat session with our classes, keep me in mind. Without further ado, you may visit my web page HERE.