Vision of the Future Part 3: The Project!

Introduction

I planned this project to increase the support I am able to provide my online students in their homes. My plan was to significantly improve my classroom website to include information about research-based practices in the areas of literacy, numeracy, and social emotional learning.

Starting Point

I started with a very basic classroom website. Two weeks ago, my website only contained the following pages:

• Announcements
• Field trip calendar
• Scholastic orders
• General information about the K-4 curriculum

The Final Project: Success!

Click here to visit my class website: https://sites.google.com/gedu.sd73.bc.ca/mrsnichol/home

My class website now has 14 new pages – that’s one new page per day during the course of this project! I’ve added a new page for our classroom expected learning behaviours rubric, 8 new pages for literacy (particularly reading) and 5 new pages for social emotional learning.

The Journey

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” (Chinese Proverb)

I started this project with a plan for a handful of pages that would introduce parents to some basic topics of literacy, numeracy, and social emotional learning. However, as the project went on, my list of pages grew exponentially. It became overwhelming because I wanted to do everything but just wouldn’t have time to. For a couple days, I felt a little lost.

Then I remembered why I chose this project: I wanted to reach out to my students and families with the ‘just in time’ help they needed. I ended up writing down a list of all my ideas so I had them ready when I had time to address them, then I could focus on just the pages I thought would be the most relevant now. Luckily it was report card time, so I was running meetings with every family. I listened to their concerns, wrote down their questions, and prioritized the pages on my list.

The resulting project reflects the needs of my students and their families more than my original vision, and I’m so happy with the result. I didn’t end up including any numeracy or writing-related pages yet, but they are still on my list for later. What I do have is an artifact that will be immediately used beyond the scope of this course!

The Challenges

I came across a couple of technology ‘speed bumps’ along the way. Some have been resolved and some I’m still working on.

First, the organization of the website took a lot of effort, and I went through a few changes. I wanted to keep the pages short enough for parents to want to read, but not so short that I had an overwhelming number of individual pages to read. Pages also needed to be grouped under logical headings, again not too many and not too few. I think I’ve hit the balance, but will wait until I get some feedback to finalize this. Luckily, the organization isn’t difficult to fix.

Second, the page design ended up taking longer than I planned. I put way too much time into finding the right header image and laying out the pages in a visually appealing way. It was another balancing act to have enough text to inform the reader, images, and links to more information. However, I think the result was worth it – I now have a template/pattern to use that I believe is appealing enough to attract people and tempt them to keep reading.

Third, it took a lot of planning to figure out how the course Moodle page would interact with the website. I knew I needed to use Moodle because it allows me to post resources that have paid licences, but I didn’t want all the information on the Moodle page because parents must log in to access it (and it is not available to the public). I ended up creating resources on the Moodle page that match the headings on the website, then adding “Visit the _ section of our class Moodle page to find related resources” type of message to the bottom of each page.

Finally, I found making videos for the website to be harder than I imagined. I share my classroom with 2 other teachers and the classroom next door is quite loud – it was difficult to find a quiet time to film. That being said, I used either the webcam software (for just video) or Screencastify extension (for screen recordings) and both worked well. They were easy to use and I quickly got used to jotting down what I wanted to say so I didn’t have to re-record as much. I would like to add more videos in the future, including an introductory tour.

The Future Plan

I’m still excited about this project and I think my motivation will only increase as my families start using it. I’ve already had parents comment that they are looking forward to what it will offer them! This is just the beginning of a website that will continue to evolve, improve, and be updated for years to come! I still have that list of about 15 more pages, and I do plan to add another couple next week.

Your Turn

I haven’t emailed my students’ families about the website yet because I’d like some feedback first. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Is there anything that needs changing? Adding? Removing? Anything that’s too wordy or confusing? Share your two wishes and a star in the comments.

References

All references used are cited on the website itself. Any references not cited on my website are:

• From my notes taken during professional development sessions hosted by the SD #73 district coordinators (I haven’t named them here because I haven’t had time to ask for their permission first).
• District resources, most of which are available on the SD #73 literacy website at http://sd73literacy.weebly.com/.
• Free use images.

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