My Website Educators have the ability to create a classroom website to use as an effective means of communication with students, parents, and colleagues.
Right now, each SAS user has a website within the SAS Portal. Once users have mastered the tools in SAS, they can change their site to reflect what's happening in their organizations, post announcements, and direct students and colleagues to a world of learning opportunities.
Benefits of a website:
Efficiency: When links on a website are connected to high-quality resources, the students quickly become used to accessing the classroom page and moving on to the resources.
Resources: Exponentially increase all students' access to high-quality curriculum materials that directly support content.
Relevance: Students will come to see the Internet as a personally relevant extension of school.
Experience: Students will gain experience using digital resources in direct support of learning; an important 21st century life skill.
Blogs
A blog is a web publishing tool that allows authors to quickly and easily self-publish text, artwork, links to other blogs or web sites, and a whole array of other content.
Blogs are created like traditional web sites, with navigation links, images, and other standard web site features. A blog is different from a typical Web site in that the primary content is comprised of postings. Blog postings are text entries (similar to a diary or journal) which include a posting date. They include subsequent comments made by people other than the author. Postings are often short and frequently updated. They appear in reverse chronological order and can include archived entries.
In addition to providing teachers with an excellent tool for communicating with students, parents, and colleagues, there are numerous educational benefits of blogs.
Blogs are:
motivating to students, especially those who otherwise might not frequently participate in classroom discussion;
provide excellent opportunities for students to read and write;
effective forums for collaboration and discussion;
powerful tools to enable scaffolded learning and mentoring to occur.
