Upon reading this assignment, I thought it was going to be a piece of cake, because I have created a Google site for a previous class. However, once I began the process, I realized that the assignment wasn’t as simple as I had once thought, because of all the requirements that were to be included on the site. But, I pushed on and completed the assignment the best I could.
I decided to create my site as a joint Webpage between my team teacher and me. Together, we will service two third grade homerooms in the coming year. This is the first year that our school has attempted team teaching, so we are the “pilot” class that will be used to determine if team teaching in third grade is a good idea for future years. The Google site I created, therefore, has a page introducing myself and the classes I will be teaching (Reading, Language, and Spelling), and another page introducing my partner teacher who will be teaching Math, Science, and Social Studies.
Actual creation of the site was not difficult, but I had trouble learning how to attach, embed, and link all the required artifacts. I realized quickly, though, that on a class website, I could post important weekly information, such as a homework schedule, important announcements, and even student-created artifacts. My new Google site, therefore, will be very useful next year as a tool to communicate with students, parents, other teachers, and administrators.
I can also see how Google sites can be used by students. Groups can collaborate to create websites about certain authors or text structures. For example, when studying text genres, I can assign different groups to create an introductory site on the different genres of text: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, etc. In third grade, however, the requirements will have to be very minimal and I will have to break down each task into manageable sub-steps. Higher grades may have more success in using Google sites in the classroom.
Again, a concern I have about using Google sites in education is the permission and consent of the parent and the privacy and protection of the student, because Google sites is linked to personal email accounts. Also, filtering software poses a challenge to using such resources in the classroom.
The following is a link to my Google site: Herring/Gilbert 3rd Grade Team
This class seems to have been very beneifical to you. It has definitely given you a jump start on the up and coming school year. Both parents nad students can benefit from the information offered on this site. This would be a great tool for you to share with other teachers in your district. They to could benefit from using the tool the way you did or as a student project. Though there may be concerns with student privacy issues there are ways around the issues, such as using codes names and unidentifing information to complete assignments. Great Job!
ReplyDeleteOne way that I got around the privacy stuff for student websites, was first I created a group in Google Groups. It works very similarly to a social networking site or message board. Then they created their sites but made them only viewable to people they invited. They posted their user names on the groups site and everybody started following everyone else. This way the site was only viewable to the class. It worked very well.
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