My school is expecting our Ofsted friends at some point this year. I’m sure most people know that a school’s website has to contain certain statutory things for our visitors to look at, but I’m interested in how it can also be a tool for learning.
Our setup for the website is that we have a flashy thing set up by our tech support as our main school webpage. Attached to that, the junior classes maintain their own pages.
I’ve been trying to engage the children in my class website more than previous years. So this year, following a blog post from Sophie Merrill (@MissSMerrill) in the summer, I added a blog page of picture comprehensions. The children write their answers as comments on the post, which they do either at home or as an activity in guided reading. Reading is a huge focus for us this year, so we have a page where children submit book reviews to “sell” a book to others in the class. We now also have a blog page discussing the book I am reading to the class.
Using Explain Everything, I create videos explaining the focus for maths that week, again encouraging the children to comment and tell me how confident they feel about the topic.
Feedback from parents so far has been overwhelmingly positive, but I want it to do more.
What are your must-haves for a class webpage?
The 8 bit Teacher 