Featuring McFalls Elm Street School

The Elm Street School is a K-8 school about 10 miles from Lewiston/Auburn. It is located in Mechanic Falls and is part of Union 29. The good people in this school need to look at every possible avenue to stretch their small budget in order to provide the very best possible learning environment in a caring, community school. Though I haven't worked with them this past year, I had the opportunity in previous years to see their dedication to grabbing every opportunity that might enhance their school. On an earlier post, we looked at the importance of classroom web presence. Check the links below to see a small sampling of the free/inexpensive solutions that Elm Street 7-8 teachers made use of:



Laurie Callahan - Social Studies





Mrs. Callahan's Portaportal







Dan Knott - Science





Mr. Knott's Portaportal







Cathy Wood



Mrs. Wood's Homework Hero Assignment Page









Gigi Lee



Mrs. Lee's Math Website and Weather WebQuest

Classroom Web Presence

I regularly check out Jim Moulton's articles on Edutopia's Spiral Notebook. Recently he posted the following: The Classroom Web Page: A Must-Have in 2008.

In it Jim argues that having a classroom web presence is important. He gives 5 reasons . . . all good points. He also gives some good places to start, including Portaportal and Google Pages.

Jim recognizes that teachers are very busy people, so that finding a workable tool for developing this web presence is important. Elaborate tools such as Studywiz and Moodle offer many options . . . and in the hands of the right person can be just the ticket . . . but I will still argue that we have to look at ease-of-use.

There really is no longer a need to use powerful, but expensive, web editors such as Dreamweaver to meet the needs of the classroom. If this kind of tool is needed, free Kompozer will suffice. But why bother?

Beyond using the great tools Jim suggested, I would also suggest using the many other possibilities, such as blogs, wikis, google apps, and other online learning environments. With a bit of searching in this very large toolbox available to us now, we can customize our presence according to our own needs. The beauty in making blogs and/or wikis the classroom vehicle is that the teacher has the freedom to decide the level of read/write collaboration needed.

My three favorite classroom web presence tools are Blogger, Wikispaces & Portaportal. I know a math teacher in the Telstar School District who swears by NiceNet. Others use some of the bookmarking sites here.

What are your favorites? Thoughts?

Photo Credit