EDT5410 - Final Synthesis project

EDT5410 - Final Synthesis Project
Melissa Shugg
Melissa.Shugg@yahoo.com

For my final project I wasn’t really sure how in-depth you wanted this project to be.  A lot of the stuff we have worked on during the class were tools I plan on using myself beyond the class.  The choices I ended up making were the ones I found would have the most impact for me in the future.  For my target audience, I actually have two focuses, the students/parents in my room as well as my fellow coworkers.  As a kindergarten teacher, my students are experiencing a structured classroom for the first time. But at the same time their parents are learning things for the first time too! The students and parents both have questions about how the classroom works.   I wanted a resource for them to ease this transition. I wanted a list of resources available to them so they could join in to the teaching process as well.  I even included a section called “Homework for Parents” that encourages them to perform an activity with their child.

 As a sub theme on my project, I also focused on the teachers of my school, specifically the new teachers we get every year as well as my coworkers I’ve worked with for years.  I had admitted in earlier reflections that technology takes a second (or tenth) seat in my school due to budget and lack of training.   Each one of us has bits and pieces of useful information.  I wanted something that would allow us to consolidate this into one place where we could all share these resources. 

I decided to create a virtual classroom website to prepare my students and their parents on what my classroom is like on the first day. (Website) I plan on sharing this link with my parents as soon as I get my class list each year. They can log in and learn about my classroom and use the tools there to help prepare their students for school. Hopefully if I can figure it out, the parents will also be able to upload a picture of their student and answer a short questionnaire before class starts.  I find that I spend a lot of time learning about my students and getting them into the swing of things at the beginning of the year.  Anything that can improve this process would be a great help.   

My webpage is designed to be a two way interface between my students and their parents and myself before we have formally met.  Some times people feel easier communicating in a non direct method so I wanted to provide an opportunity for them to do so. Also I will be getting some valuable feedback from my parents.  I have a survey for them to complete on the page that features a list of questions for them to answer. It’s not complete but has some of the biggest ones I like to know about my students.  Also I included a list of resources for teaching parents how to help their students succeed in school.  Some are sites I’ve used before while others are ones I discovered and liked while working on this project.   The learning objective of this site is to share my information with my students and their parents in an easy to use format.   I didn’t want a lot of frills and gadgets on the page so stuck with a simple design with lots of information.   I don’t expect it to replace my welcome packet I send home but to be  more of a supplement to it.

The actual design of my site was created using a template I found on the Google sites page. It’s a fairly basic classroom layout.  I stripped out all of the other teacher’s materials and imputed what was important to me.  As I learn more about how to make the sites I will make it more functional but that will certainly be a hefty learning curve.  For example just figuring out how to get an email address to open your email program just by clicking on it took me about an hour and a half to figure out!  Turns out you need to edit the html which I didn’t know how to do. I ended up having to copy some from another site and just changed the email name to mine.  Presto and it worked!  Some things I could just flat out not figure out how to do.  I wanted an active calendar on my page but the layout of our district calendar did not seem to want to mesh with my page.  The best I could do was have a picture of it that links to the actual calendar when you click on it.  I put a message below it to “click to update” the calendar.  Eventually when our school puts out its own calendar I will replace it with a Google app that has the dates/events for our school on it.

Continuing on the first day theme, I’m creating some other tools to ease the beginning of school transition for the new teachers in my school specifically but also for my current coworkers as well.  First off, I created a second delicious bookmark page. (School Delicious Page)  This is different than my personal one I made for class. I’m going to share it with my coworkers as it lists all the sites we use during a school year.  Things like payroll, grade book, Michigan education standards, etc. Hopefully it will be helpful to new teachers in our school and for the inevitable times when we come back and discover our PC has been “upgraded” over the summer break and all our stuff is gone. I included links to some of the useful free tools on my delicious page like open office, Zoho and Phixr. Teachers don’t make a lot of money so free software is always good.  I plan on getting the other teachers in my school to share some of their favorite links and then update the bookmarks into clear categories.  With a bit of work it can become a really useful page for the teachers at my school.  I considered doing a Wiki instead but found that it would be too time consuming and I have doubts that my coworkers would contribute.   I can see it would be nice for a corporate environment with lots of documents and training materials to share but teachers just don’t have the time or desire to make something that in-depth.  The learning objective of this page is to share useful resources with my coworkers, to save time as well as to pick up useful resources for myself.

The final tool I’m going to mention though it creation is beyond the scope of this class due to time constraints. I’m going to create a screencast video of how I designed and edited my Google webpage.  I just don’t have time to do the video justice in the short amount of time I have left in this class but I was amazed at how easy it was to create the pages.  Before this class if I was told I had to make a website I would of dropped out of the class for sure.  Now I want to share it with my coworkers!  I thought that a screencast showing exactly how I made the various parts of my webpage would certainly ease their fears about making their own. The hard part will be convincing them it will be worth their time.  I honestly think it will.

Though I touched on them above, I wanted to emphasize a bit more on my justifications for using the tools I choose.   Why replace a paper welcome packet for the first day of class with a webpage?  Why make a social list of bookmarks when I could just email the links?  I think both of these have similar answers that tie into how humans absorb information.  I spend many hours at the beginning of each school year creating my welcome packet.  I know that a good portion of my student’s parents never read it.  I know this because I get the same questions every year that are covered in the packet!  Also, I’ve lost track of the number of times I have asked a friend, family member or coworker “did you get that email I sent?” and was faced with a blank stare. We get a lot of information all the time. Our brains have grown accustomed to sorting out the useless stuff. I’m guilty of doing it myself. I read about 20 Facebook updates today from close friends and couldn’t tell you what even a handful of them said if my life depended on it.  In order to get someone to see and retain information it needs to be laid out visually and simplistically.  A lot of our text talked about studies that found the best ways to do this.  To me a website was the best way to do this.  It combines text layout, color and images exactly the way you want to draw attention combined with instant gratification of reaching the information you are seeking out.   You don’t have to flip through pages of information like you do a paper packet when you are looking for a classroom policy, you just click and you have it.  Just as Siegel used Amazon.com as a contrast to a brick and mortar book store, my classroom introduction website offers so much more than a paper packet would.

The delicious page I designed is less visual but features a more streamlined layout thanks to the simplistic engine built into the website. It’s an easy way to share information with those that are seeking it out. In this case, the information being shared are useful bookmarks for myself and my coworkers.  Using metatags is like having an entire index available instantaneously.  Siegel’s concepts in this case are relying on computers to not really improve on a teaching method but to make finding information quicker and easier..  Instead it’s organizing things so you can find them again. I couldn’t imagine any way quicker to share web information except for some of the high tech stuff that was discussed in the last chapter of our text like downloading memories.   I guess we have to make do with sharing bookmarks until then. 

CAA Kindergarten Welcome Website:
https://sites.google.com/site/caagradek/

CAA Teachers Delicious bookmarks:
http://www.delicious.com/mbogucki