Week 3 and Classroom Websites

Week 3 has been my favorite week so far! Currently, we are working on classroom websites. By setting up a website using Weebly, I have been able to start creating a website that reflects my personality and who I want to be as a teacher. It is getting me very excited for the future and has been very easy to navigate. Weebly is by far the best and easiest to try because of the left-hand side navigation bar.With this tool, I can pick numerous set ups, themes, and even include my contact information by just clicking and dragging the icon that I need. I never knew that it was this simple to create a website and am happy to say I am really enjoying the process.Normally for my type A personality, this would be a nightmare because I want everything just so. (Teaching has definitely taught me to relax a little more) and I also like that in the future, I can adjust and recreate or edit the website without losing anything. With that being said, it does take a bit of time to find out what you would like your website to look like, and takes more time than just class periods to finish. We were shown how to add a calendar onto the site and this was fairly difficult, especially if you have never done anything like this before. I still have not added one but would like to do so. What I was able to do was add links to websites such as the curriculums that I have worked with in the past and will be when it is time to do our second placement. I am hoping to be able to use the website for my next placement. It will let parents be able to get to know me a little better and parents can access what we are doing in the class. I will be in a Grade 4 class so I think I will be keeping things simple and base my audience towards parents. Later on, if I teach an older grade, I will include students more and split my website for both parents and students. This has been a learning process and it does take time. If you are just as curious and eager as I am, I think you would really enjoy it! I am hoping to have my website up and running soon. Luckily, I will always be able to change it and add new things so I am not as worried about making it exactly the way I would like. I could spend hours moving and adjusting things. It was a little strange to create a website for a pretend class, but once I started to play around with it and was able to see what it can do I was more at ease and comfortable with the idea.