What is the difference between a classroom blog or website and your own professional blog? How does your writing change based on who your audience is? How does the formattng of your text change? Why would you want to separate a professional blog and a classroom website?
More and more educators are creating personal websites for numerous purposes. Some are creating websites for their classroom, to keep parents informed and to provide students with important information and links about the curriculum and learning. Others are creating professional websites, to stay up to date with the latest trends in education, curriculum, learning, pedagogy, and technology. Whatever the case, there appears to be a clear separation between classroom websites and professional websites.
It's important when creating a classroom or professional website, to understand the clear distinction between the two. It might be best to keep the two separate, rather than incorporating both into one website. A classroom website needs to be structured in a way, that provides clear cut expectations for students to follow, and parents to monitor. A professional website is more open in its presentation, offering more open ended questions and ideas, in terms of education and educational reform. The key is tor remember your target audiences. A classroom website is intended to be viewed by students, parents/guardians, administration, and teaching partners. A professional website or blog on the other hand, is intended to be viewed by other teachers and educators, professionals, collaborators, and a more general audience of readers interested in education and its advancements.
Since each website is effected by its audience, the formatting of it can be much different to meet the needs of its readers. A teacher website is formatted in a way that is easy to read, contains bold lettering that is large and easy to follow, and has links for students to access. A professional website will have more in depth paragraphs discussing various issues in education, containing lots of educational terms and references. The purpose of this is to better meet the goals for each website. The central goal for a teacher website, is to provide students and parents with the means to obtain the answers they need to be successful. The ultimate goal of a professional website is to question education and pedagogy among educators, so we are always mindful of our teaching practices, and that they are meeting the needs or our students.
Do you find all of your students and their families have access to your website, or do you still need to send home hard copy newsletters? The school I am at has gone digital with the school newsletter but reminder stickers are printed to be put in agendas. I still print and send home a classroom newletter rather than emailing or using a digital format.
ReplyDeleteA good point Kristine. When I started to put most of my information and newsletters up on the website, I found that many of the families/parents were not checking the information. I found, even thought I didn't love it, that an email list worked well.
ReplyDeleteRemind 101 was also a great tool for this.
Zoe