Post 2: Weebly webpages

This week I made a Weebly webpage, made a new blog for this class, and I signed up for a delicious and twitter account. The website I think will be a great teacher tool because I can have a class website with assignment instructions, I could save paper by putting up weekly newsletters on my website, and I could profile our classroom activities on the site. The website could be used at my grade level but I think I would use the website as more of teaching tool and a parent's reference tool. For students I would make a class website and use the computer how to show students how to make one and how I will upload their work so that parents can see at home on the their personal computers what students are doing in my class. I think it may be too difficult to have first graders make ones their own, but if I show them how easy it is to post their work, they may be less intimated to make a website later on in upper grades. The strengths of having a website is that it saves paper, and parent's can 24 hour access to the website if they lose the newsletters, don’t understand their student’s homework, etc. The only weakness I see is the same weakness I see for all of the technology I have learned about this week in that, if parents do not have a home computer or are close to a library, they will not have access to the technology. Lastly, with webpages when it comes to access and student learning curves, I think the idea I mentioned above where I show the students how to use the webpage on a teacher workstation, in the school’s computer lab, they will be able to help their parents access the webpage at home. Also I can send home a paper step-by-step letter as to how to access the class website to the parents.