educator450

Today I attended a great online conference entitled Options for Building Your Teacher Website and Why YOU Should.  It was definitely worth my (and any other educator’s) 20 minutes and 44 seconds.  In this short amount of time I learned why teacher websites are extremely necessary, various sites to use in constructing my website and ideas for what my website could contain.  By the end of the conference, I felt confident that I could AND would construct a helpful website this school year.

I chose this conference because it was extremely relevant to my teaching.  I do in fact have a teacher website (through the school) that I spent a bit of time constructing.  It has the basics (schedule, contact information) and several pictures of my classroom.  However, it was more of a one-time requirement than a continuous project.  Once it was up and running, I rarely made any updates.  In fact, we were encouraged to keep it simple and low maintenance.

 I honestly want to build and maintain a great teacher website.  My goal is to improve my communication with my students and their families.  I want my parents to be informed and impressed.  As a parent, I would enjoy and appreciate a look into the classroom with weekly updates and pictures of various projects.  My own website would also allow me to include the great Web 2.0 tools I have learned throughout this 10-week course.

 I would highly encourage any educator to take part in this conference.  It moves quickly and is filled with lots of information, including websites of various teachers to look at.  I wish that more of our required professional development hours could be spent in this format.  I was able to choose a conference that I was interested in.  It was great having a choice (and doing it in my sweatpants at home was even better)!!