Setting Up New Class Website

I receive a lot of questions from colleagues about how they would go about setting up a classroom website similar to what I have for my classes at biologycorner.com.   The answer isn’t really simple, the entire process can be technical and time consuming.   The good news is, there are now many tools available for teachers to create sites with minimal technical knowledge and creativity.  Even sites like facebook can be used as a classroom tool where you can post daily assignments and news.   Honestly, for beginners, I don’t recommend trying to create a website from scratch.  Learning html and putting a website up was actually much easier to do 10 years ago than it is now.   HTML has been replaced by content management systems (CMS), and an array of style sheets and coding to make the site web-compliant.   I purchased the newest version of dreamweaver to update pages and have been plodding my way through tons of new commands and requirements.  I’m amazed that I actually yearn for the “old days” of plain old .html.

That being said, since my summer project is relearning physics and creating resources for my students, I can share with you the process I’m going through to put all of that together.   Bear in mind, biologycorner.com uses a content management system (WordPress) to manage the pages and I already have a domain set up to upload the files.  The Physics class I’ll be teaching in the Fall is going to be published in a simple html format using tables.   It is a work in progress, but I do have it published now at  http://www.biologycorner.com/physics/.   As of this date, it is incomplete.

There are many phases to the building of this resource.  The first phase involves me actually relearning concepts such as momentum, inertia and energy.  For this, I have a basic textbook, which is designed for middle school science.   I like the Physical Science Textbook, it is published by National Geographic and has excellent pictures to illustrate concepts and written at about an 8th grade reading level.  Sadly, I’m told we don’t have enough for all of the students so I am  keeping this in mind.  All of the resources will be stand-alone, not requiring students to have a textbook.

The first chapter deals with motion.  I have some vague memories of this from my college days, but definitely needs some brushing up.  I use the book to create a power point presentation which I write using docs.google.com so that students don’t need special software to view the presentations and you can look at them online easily.  This is also a good way to store ppt’s without taking up a large amount of space on my limited hosting service. Creating these presentations is my way to relearn the topics.

Once the presentation is complete, I need to add worksheets and labs and assignments for the students.  For this, I start with a google search, using parameters like “labs with motion”  or “velocity homework”.    I found these searches didn’t yield a lot of good results.  Many of the physics sites are beyond what my students level will be.  Some of the resources just describe the concepts and give examples but do not provide much for the students to do.  At this point I may have to create some of my own labs using *IDEAS* I find from other sources.  I created “Speed and the Two-Step” in this way, based off an idea I found that had students measure their own walking speed.

Because students will not have a book to use, I also want to find a reading resource related to the topic.  I also use google to search for articles, this time I use terms such as “speed”, “newton”, and “velocity”.    I ended up writing my own article on Newton’s Laws based on the research I did.   I also add questions to the end of the reading to encourage students to read it.   So now, I have the presentation, a lab and an article to go with that topic.

Students also need a math component and practice using the velocity equations.  This was pretty easy, I found a file in the folder another teacher gave me that velocity problems.   The worksheet was pretty boring to look at so I added some pictures.   I decided to label any “mathy-type” worksheet with the prefix “problemset”, just to help me stay organized – hence, this worksheet is called problemset_velocity.  I predict as the site is developed I will have many “problemsets” and “articles” and “labs”, so keeping them organized by name is a priority.  I learned this from experience, biologycorner.com is STILL a mess because I did not standardize how I was labeling each of the resources.

Now that I have most of the resources I want for the topic of motion,  can create the html documents from the word documents (I’ll spare you the details on that) and add them to the physics page.  I will also spare you the details of how I decided on the design of the page – it’s more or less based on a template.

As an afterthought, I realized that without a book I was going to completely rely on the students’ note taking abilities for the information we learn about in class.   After some inner debate, I decided that printing the notes out for the students would be best, and then perhaps leaving some blanks for the students to fill in as we go through the lecture to keep them engaged.   To do this, I went to the presentation in google and used the “print” function, choosing to print 4 slides per page.  (Most of my presentations are 10-20 slides, so that would be too much paper copying.)   Here, I did run into a bit of an issue, google exports this as a pdf file, which is nice if you don’t need to make any changes or edits.  To add the “blanks” to the notes I had to convert the pdf to a word document that I could edit.  This required some searching, but I eventually found a free online pdf to doc converter.   Once converted, I just went through the slides and replaced some of the words with blanks.   I posted a link to the “lecture notes” on the physics site.

The entire process, creating the presentation and the worksheets, labs and articles for a single chapter in the book took me about 20 hours.   On the bright side, I did most of those hours in my pajamas while watching news feeds.

June 22, 2010 · smuskopf · Comments Closed
Posted in: Best Practices