I've teamed up with the latest #littlefishteacher Blogger Linkup hosted by Hanging Around in Primary and Pop Into Primary to bring you some fabulous Back to School Tips.
With back to school right around the corner for many of us, we are all looking for ways to keep our parents well informed. Communication with your parents is vital to the success of your students. A great way to do this is to put together your own website. I started one a couple of years ago and it was much easier than what I thought it would be. Parents can use our classroom website as a learning tool, a source of information, and a way to stay connected. Yes, as teachers we all stay connected with notes, logs, newsletters, emails, phone calls and conferences but by creating a website can also bring a whole new level of communication to your parents.
I used Weebly to get started. It is free and very user friendly. You can have your site up in no time. Several teachers across the country have found success using Weebly. There are several other sites to help you get started but I thought Weebly was pretty easy to navigate through with tutorials that can easily get you started. You can post all those newsletters that you send home, classroom rules, word lists, and so much more. One of the benefits of having a website is that you can post direct links to helpful educational websites or video clips for your students. I do usually give a hard copy of my monthly newsletters to my students but they do sometimes get lost. Now, parents can simply log in and check on important information that they might have missed. There is no excuse for students claiming they do not know the classroom rules when they are posted on the site. You can post lots of helpful hints for parents on your site and not worry about wasting massive amounts of paper. I even set up a separate Pinterest account just for my classroom. This set of boards has tons of video clips that are categorized to help support learning at home. Parents have access to this special Pinterest account through my Weebly Website simply by clicking on the P which is a direct link to these special boards. You could also post some photographs of your students busy at work in class. Parents would love to see what they are doing. I even posted an end of the year slideshow I put together on Movie Maker and posted it to my sight. My parents were ecstatic as they were overjoyed to see their child and the friendships they made throughout the year. Be sure to clear it with my principal and make sure you have permission from all my parents through the photo and internet forms that were sent home.
At the beginning of the year, it is helpful to send a questionnaire to your parents and be sure that they have access to the internet. This way you will know which students need a hard copy of certain documents. If it is really important, I would definitely send home a hard copy to your entire class.
You may already have lots of older newsletters and documents that you send home and just tweak each year to accommodate the needs of your students and classroom already saved on your computer. Simply copy and paste your documents from Microsoft Word or wherever you store them and add to your site. It is really that simple. You can easily fancy things up with some clip art and you have a professional looking website. Do you have a classroom website? I would love to check it out. Here is a link to my website:http://mrsfrazierskinders.weebly.com/ My website is quite extensive as you will see lots of tabs across the top. I especially love my literacy tabs with built in word lists for each vowel sound, high frequency word lists and more.
****Be sure to check it our soon as I will need to many of the postings down for the start of the new year. The best part about Weebly is that you can hide certain tabs and tweak them as needed from year to year. Now that my website is up and running, I only need to tweak just a little from year to year.
If you are thinking about starting one, I hope this site can inspire you with some ideas. I am hoping to check out some of your classroom websites and find some new fresh ideas as well. Please leave a comment with links to your site or if you found this post helpful to you.
Now head over to Hanging Around in Primary or Pop Into Primary to see what other tips have been shared!
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