Standard 3.7 Communication and CollaborationCandidates utilize digital communication and collaboration tools to communicate locally and globally with students, parents, peers, and the larger community.
(PSC 3.7/ISTE 3g) McConnell Middle School Website |
The artifact I have included for Standard 3.7 is a link to my school’s website. I have been solely responsible for McConnell Middle School’s public web presence for well over a decade. Since moving the school’s site to Google Sites in 2010 I have refined and continued to evolve this site to take advantage of the seamless integration with our GAFE (Google Apps For Education) domain which we established in 2011. The current revision of the site was built exclusively in Google Sites. The site has always been used as a portal to facilitate communication and collaboration with students, family members, peers, and the larger community. The school’s website incorporates links to teacher websites, teacher’s D2L courses, school and homework calendars, contact information, my technology site, blogs, learning links, and much more.
School websites are obviously an important digital communication tool. I continue to also feel that teacher websites are equally essential communication tools and I am proud that our school has continued to require them for all teachers in spite of the district’s shift to D2L and away from public websites for teachers. Having teachers take ownership of their own web presence is something I feel very strongly about. The school can communicate by phone, email, Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to appear as inviting and open to collaboration as possible, however, the classroom teacher is the essential last mile of that effort. A single teacher that appears aloof or closed will easily destroy our efforts. In addition, I use this my website, which is linked to the school’s site, to share ideas, strategies, and random thoughts with people all over the earth. As I tell staff members over and over again, a website is the single most important digital communication and collaboration tool you will ever have access to for communicating locally and globally.
The evolution and maintenance of our school’s website continues to provide me with new knowledge, skills, and challenges. The website began as a simple, static communication platform. However, as the needs of the school and community changed I have often found ways to address them through the site. For example, three years ago, during a vertical team meeting, a group of teachers at our feeder elementary schools shared the anxiety many 5th grade students and parents felt as they prepared to move to middle school. They felt that middle school teachers were not as nurturing and welcoming as elementary school teachers. After surveying parents, I determined that those parents and students who came to open house had their fears immediately put to rest. My solution was to ask all of our 6th grade teachers to record a short introductory video containing the main points they would communicate during an open house and post it on their website during the summer. The response from parents was so overwhelmingly positive that last year we included connections teachers in the video outreach as parents so rarely get to interact with them. As we move forward I would like to leverage the school’s website to further reduce the time students and staff spend looking for key resources.
While our school website is not intended to compete with D2L or the student portal as a curriculum resource, teachers are encouraged to place resources that parents or guardians might find useful. Parents are also encouraged to subscribe to their student’s homework calendars. In fact, I produced a training video a few years ago showing parents how to do just that without a gmail account. Placing direct links to teacher’s eClass (D2L) course pages this year is the first step in this effort. The school website has always been an essential communication tool. However, in recent years it has become more and more integral to learning, collaboration, and the promotion of a shared mission within our community.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it must take an entire city to educate that child. By bringing our community together through our website, we have impacted school improvement in many ways. First of all, we have given parents and students an organizational tool that centralizes resources and respects their time. This can easily be demonstrated by using several metrics from the amount of traffic our website gets right down to the number of times my instructional videos for parents have been viewed. We can also track spikes in eClass usage that occurred after we began placing quick-access links on the website to how many subscribers are currently following our various homework calendars.
School websites are obviously an important digital communication tool. I continue to also feel that teacher websites are equally essential communication tools and I am proud that our school has continued to require them for all teachers in spite of the district’s shift to D2L and away from public websites for teachers. Having teachers take ownership of their own web presence is something I feel very strongly about. The school can communicate by phone, email, Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to appear as inviting and open to collaboration as possible, however, the classroom teacher is the essential last mile of that effort. A single teacher that appears aloof or closed will easily destroy our efforts. In addition, I use this my website, which is linked to the school’s site, to share ideas, strategies, and random thoughts with people all over the earth. As I tell staff members over and over again, a website is the single most important digital communication and collaboration tool you will ever have access to for communicating locally and globally.
The evolution and maintenance of our school’s website continues to provide me with new knowledge, skills, and challenges. The website began as a simple, static communication platform. However, as the needs of the school and community changed I have often found ways to address them through the site. For example, three years ago, during a vertical team meeting, a group of teachers at our feeder elementary schools shared the anxiety many 5th grade students and parents felt as they prepared to move to middle school. They felt that middle school teachers were not as nurturing and welcoming as elementary school teachers. After surveying parents, I determined that those parents and students who came to open house had their fears immediately put to rest. My solution was to ask all of our 6th grade teachers to record a short introductory video containing the main points they would communicate during an open house and post it on their website during the summer. The response from parents was so overwhelmingly positive that last year we included connections teachers in the video outreach as parents so rarely get to interact with them. As we move forward I would like to leverage the school’s website to further reduce the time students and staff spend looking for key resources.
While our school website is not intended to compete with D2L or the student portal as a curriculum resource, teachers are encouraged to place resources that parents or guardians might find useful. Parents are also encouraged to subscribe to their student’s homework calendars. In fact, I produced a training video a few years ago showing parents how to do just that without a gmail account. Placing direct links to teacher’s eClass (D2L) course pages this year is the first step in this effort. The school website has always been an essential communication tool. However, in recent years it has become more and more integral to learning, collaboration, and the promotion of a shared mission within our community.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it must take an entire city to educate that child. By bringing our community together through our website, we have impacted school improvement in many ways. First of all, we have given parents and students an organizational tool that centralizes resources and respects their time. This can easily be demonstrated by using several metrics from the amount of traffic our website gets right down to the number of times my instructional videos for parents have been viewed. We can also track spikes in eClass usage that occurred after we began placing quick-access links on the website to how many subscribers are currently following our various homework calendars.