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July 2020: Creating a Class Website

At this point we all agree that we will inevitably have at least some of our students learning virtually this year (or at the very least, absent from our classrooms for an extended period of time). 

Our school hasn't decided what school will look like in August yet, but I want to be prepared. We will be one-to-one this year, so I plan to use our chromebooks often. One of my goals is to find ways to improve my online teaching experience from the spring.

We used google classroom at our school. Overall, I think it's great. It's easy to use, you can schedule assignments ahead of time, and giving feedback is a breeze. However, there are some things I didn't like about it:
  • Not being able to have important information pinned on the stream
  • Being overwhelmed by all of the documents and information on the classwork page (even when it was organized)
  • Not having a central place to post important links to things we used often
Thankfully, our school required us (and paid for) all of us to get Google Level 1 certified this summer. I consider myself pretty Google literate, but I had never heard of or used Google Sites before. As I played around with it during the training modules, I was pretty impressed and I was inspired to create one for my Algebra 2 classroom. It solve my three issues with Google Classroom:
  • It has an announcement banner option! 
  • I can create separate pages with well organized sections for different documents students need access to
  • I have a whole page of important links (like the Desmos calculators, Delta Math, and my Calendly office hours link)
Check out my Algebra 2 site here. It's still a work in progress and I'd love feedback.

Do you have a class website? I'd love to hear what else you include on yours, or anything else you would suggest!

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