I wanted to make a website for the yearbook club and post some of these photos in galleries. It’s a great way to promote the yearbook and the kids like seeing themselves online. There were some legal issues that I’m working out with the administration, but there were also some technical issues.

Although I obviously can create and host my own website, I don’t have access to web space with php hosting for the yearbook club. I didn’t want to mix school stuff with my own stuff, so I didn’t want to host it here. The simplest solution for me (which I also use for class blogs) was a free blog hosted on WordPress.com.

That is, until I realized that I couldn’t easily embed slideshows from other websites (i.e. Picasa). Doh! The embed and iframe tags that are usually used to include slide shows gets wiped out by WordPress’ security.

I figured out a work around, though. http://www.slideshare.net/ allows you to create and host unlimited slideshows for free. They also offer an option to embed the slideshow into a WordPress blog, and its compatible with a free WordPress.com blog. This solved my technical problems and I don’t have to worry about storage space.

Shortly, I’m going to write up an article about this for Associated Content. I’ll link to it when it’s published. In the meantime, here’s a sample gallery. The pictures are just of my backyard. I’m still working on the legal issues, so I haven’t actually hosted any slideshows of students yet.

Recently, I read about some problems that people had with the site last fall (before I started using it). As the Spring progressed, I had also experienced some problems – although nothing like what other people experienced. I found that at times the site was slow (especially during the schoolday), and sometimes the servers would be overwhelmed and they would just reject requests until traffic slowed down.

I still like the idea, though, and I didn’t have time to research/find an alternative, so I began the year using the same system.  So far?  So good.

Connection Issues

Last year, there would routinely be times when I had trouble connecting to the site. The administrators of Engrade said they had updated their server capacity, but I didn’t notice a lot of improvement last year.

This year, things are much better. Every once in a while, I attempt to enter a value into the book and I get an error that the connection was lost. These isolated issues might be due to the crappiness of our school network, I’m not sure. But, I haven’t experienced any kind of blanket blackouts. I’ve used it to take attendance just about every day in every class (early morning, mid afternoon, late afternoon), and it’s always worked at an acceptable speed.

Advertisements

One thing I noted in my initial review (and that some people may be concerned about) is that Engrade is supported through advertisements. They previously showed a small block of Google Adsense ads to students, while these ads were not served up to people logged in as teachers.

That policy seems to have changed slightly, and I now see the ads on my teacher account. It doesn’t bother me much, and I’ve never heard students complain about it. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s some kind of philosophical problem – but nothing is really “free,” and this seems like a small price to pay.

Backups

Even if you’ve got 100% confidence in a system (like Engrade), you had better back up your data. There’s always a fluke chance that something will go wrong, and you don’t want to be stuck at the end of a marking cycle with no grades in your book…

This isn’t too hard to do.  While you’re viewing your gradebook, there’s an option titled “Export to Excel.” This exports all of the data as a .csv file – which stands for comma separated values. It’s not in an actual Excel spreadsheet. The info is sorted into a standard filetype that can be opened and formatted by any spreadsheet/database program. The data won’t be quite as pretty as it was in Engrade, but it will all be there – with the overall grade, each assignment, and each grade for each student for each assignment.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, though. I wish there was an option on the site to export all of your active gradebooks. This would make the backup process less time consuming. I’m wondering if I could write an online script that would access your gradebook, retrieve the csv file, and e-mail it to you…

Printing the Gradebook…

This is my biggest pet peeve about Engrade, and probably the only reason I would consider going to another system. At the end of the year, I’m required to hand in a hard copy of my gradebook.

While you can print out your gradebook, there’s no simple way to print out the whole thing. The online chart only shows 8 assignments at a time, and you need to print each page of the gradebook separately. Last year, that took me a good hour or two to print out the reports for my last two semesters.

This year, I’m going to see if it’s easier to export the gradebook to Excel, slap some formatting on it, and print it out that way. If it is, I’ll post up how to do that. But I wish Engrade had a standard way to print out all of your active gradebooks… or at the very least to print out the entire gradebook for one class.

Bottom Line – Good, Bad, Ugly?

I’m still quite pleased with the system. My students love it. If they don’t physically see the grades, they often have no concept of what they’ve done, what they haven’t done, and what grade they’re getting in the class. This fixes that problem straight off.

It’s hard to argue with a poor grade when 90% of the assignments are labeled “Missing.” It also gives them a clear roadmap to improve that grade – handing in all those missing assignments.

There are some minor pet peeves that annoy me (only being able to export/backup one gradebook at a time, not being able to print the gradebooks easily), but these are outweighed by the positives. This year, I’ve had no trouble with connections, and I’m confident that my data is secure. I’ve had more problems in the past with (almost) losing papers, flash drives, and dead hard drives.

With that in mind, I’m happy to leave my main gradebook on a secured cloud server, and let them worry about not losing it.

But have you looked at what WordPress created for you yet? Do you think it looks a bit, umm, ugly?

If you don’t, then I’m here to tell you: It’s ugly.

Luckily you can make it look much prettier with absolutely no web design experience. Even if you do know how to design web sites, choosing a pre-designed theme from WordPress is much quicker than fiddling with the design yourself.

Changing Your Site’s Theme

The appearance of your WordPress site is based on a theme. WordPress provides its users with several dozen free themes to choose from.

To view these themes, go to your Dashboard and click on the Appearance button on the left-hand menu.

This will bring up the Theme Browser. At the top of the page, you’ll see the theme that you are currently listed. The rest of the page is a list of available themes.

Take note that that is only the first page of the available themes. There are five pages worth of themes to pick from – a total of 60+ themes! Not bad for a system that’s 100% free and completely point-and-click.

When you find a theme that you think you like, click on the picture. This will bring up a full size preview of your site with the new theme.

Does it look good? If so, click the “Activate Theme Name Here” link in the upper right. Otherwise, click in the X in the top left and keep looking. There’s bound to be something in there that fits your tastes.

Not All Themes Are Created Equally

When choosing a theme, there are a couple things you should keep in mind.

Sidebars Are Important. Some themes don’t have a sidebar – they just have a list of posts going down the center. This would be ok for a very simple site, but a sidebar is a very useful tool when it comes to navigating your site. I’d think twice about picking a theme that doesn’t have a sidebar on the side. (Note: Don’t worry about what’s in the sidebar. You can change that later)

Wider Is Not Better. The main content area shouldn’t be too wide. About 500px (what you’re reading now) is a good size. Anything wider will make your lines of text too long – and reduce readability. This is especially a concern if you work with students that struggle with reading.

Text Formatting Is Important. Pick a theme because it’s readable, not because it’s cool. Pay attention to the color of the text and the color of the background. Something like “Cutline” (featured in the screenshot above) is very simple, but it’s also very readable. Again, you’ll want to pay special attention to this if your students aren’t great readers. If your site is difficult for your students to read, they just won’t use it. Lose-lose situation.

Play Around. Find Something You Like.

There are a lot of options, so the only way to find the right one is to play around a bit. Take some time to try out different themes before you move on to the next step.

You may want to ask your students for some input. Remember that they are the ones that are going to be reading it regularly! At least we hope so…

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Maybe trying to advise two clubs – and one of them being the Yearbook – wasn’t such a good idea. Oops.

Writing posts – like all administrative tasks on your blog – are performed through the dashboard. This is a private area that only you can access. In the dashboard, you can add/edit/delete posts, re-organize your posts, and change your theme, among other things.

Getting to the Dashboard

First thing we’ll need to do is log in and get to the dashboard.

Navigate to WordPress.com. You’ll see a log-in box to the left labeled, “Already hip?” Fill in your user name and password to log in.

Once you’re logged into WordPress.com, you’ll see a gray bar going across the top of the screen. This has a number of options – “My Account,” “My Dashboard(s),” “New Post.”

If you place the mouse over “My Dashboard(s),” you should see the name of your blog. Click on that to enter your blog’s dashboard.

You can also navigate directly to the dashboard for a particular site. Enter the blog’s domain name (i.e. mysite.wordpress.com) and then add ‘/wp-admin’ at the end. For the mysite domain, the full url would be http://mysite.wordpress.com/wp-admin.

If you bookmark this URL, you can get back to your dashboard quickly in the future. If you aren’t already logged in, it will prompt you to do so when you try to access the wp-admin page.

Creating a New Post

In the dashboard, you’ll see a lot of options. You may want to take some time to poke around and explore. 

When you’re ready to move on, find the Posts option in the column on the left. If you click on the little arrow, it will drop down a few options – Edit, Add New, Tags, and Categories. Click on Add New to bring up a blank post for you to edit.

To publish a basic post, fill in the Title box and type up your assignment in the main text area underneath the title. In the screenshot to the right, I just typed up a quick note that the students had a basic homework assignment.

When you’re satisfied with your work, click on the Publish button to the right. You’ll end up back on the same screen, but there will be a message up top that says, “Post published. View post.”

Click on the “View post“ link and you’ll see your brand new post!

Formatting Your Post

Although you could manually create the HTML to format your post, WordPress does all of the hard work for you. By default, it just presents the information as plain text.

You can spice things up a bit with some extra formatting. Underneath the Title field are a handful of buttons to do so. These buttons make up the WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editor for WordPress.

For example, you can make a phrase boldface by highlighting the phrase and clicking the big “B” button. Hmm… does that seem familiar?

For the most part, these basic formatting options (Bold, Italic, Underline, Listing, etc) are done as if you were using a word processor. It should be fairly straightforward.

One button you’ll definitely want to take note of is the one that looks like a chain link. By highlighting a phrase and clicking this button, you can add a hyperlink to another webpage. All you have to do is copy the URL of the target page into the dialog box, and WordPress automatically formats the link for you.

Uploading and Inserting Files

Next, let’s upload a file to include in our post.

Look at the four buttons labeled Upload/Insert. From left to right, these allow you to upload a picture, a video file, a music file, “other” files (i.e. Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, pdf files, Power Point slideshows), and polls.

I’m going to add a Power Point slideshow, so I’ll click the fourth button from the left – the pointy sunburst icon.

This brings up an interactive form that lets me upload and label the file.

Click on the “Select File” button and find the file on your computer using the standard Windows Open File dialog box.

You’ll definitely want to fill in the “Title” and “Caption” fields. The “Title” will be the text that WordPress uses when it creates a link to the file.

You can leave the “Description” box empty and leave the Link URL field alone. It defaults to “File URL,” which is what we want.

When you’re done, click “Insert into Post,” and a link will be created to your Power Point file (or other document).

Don’t worry about conserving space with these files. WordPress gives you 3gb of storage on the server. That’s enough to hold a lifetime’s worth of Power Point slides and Word documents. Halfway through the year, I haven’t even come close to using 1% of that allowance (30mb).

Organizing Posts

There’s one last thing we’ll take a look at before we wrap up for the day: organizing your posts. 

You could just publish information on a daily basis without any organization. A patient student would be able to follow your archives backwards (or use the search box) and eventually find the right piece of information.

Or, you could use ome standard WordPress features to help organize your information. The most important tool you have at your disposal for this is Categories.

While you’re writing up a post, there’s a box to the right labeled “Categories.” By default, there’s one category: Uncategorized.

You can create as many categories as you want to organize your posts, and you can put posts into multiple categories. Students can then view posts that are only in a selected category.

For example, you might want to create a category for your different types of assignments – Homework, Classwork, Projects, etc. You also might want to create a category for each Chapter or Unit.

Play Around. Explore.

We just explored some of the basic aspects of making a new post. However, you should play around with some of the other options – adding special formatting, embedding video files (like YouTube videos), uploading pictures, etc.

I’d also give some thought to how you want to organize your posts. Creating that organization structure ahead of time will help you stay organized later on.

When you done, move on to the next step and play around with the layout of your site.

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• Previous: Creating a Site: Using WordPress to Build Your Class Website

The next question to surface is probably, “Where and how can I create one of these things?”

If you want to spend some money, you’ve got plenty of options. If you’re like me, though, you’re on a slim budget. Don’t worry – there are a couple great, 100% free options!

The system I used to create Rockin’ American History (the sample site from the previous page) is WordPress.com. It’s simple, elegant, and has a lot of beatiful themes for you to choose from.

Google offers free blogs through Blogger. They are somewhat more simple and straightforward. I tend to find them uglier and more difficult to navigate, although there are some more options for customization.

A third option to consider is Edublogs. They are created using the WordPress software, so in that sense Edublogs is very similar to WordPress.com. However, the group that runs Edublogs has obviously targeted educators in particular. These were a great option for years, but recently they included some advertising that makes the system somewhat less desirable.

For the rest of this guide, I’m going to assume that you’re using WordPress.com.

Creating an Account

Step one. Create an account.

Go to WordPress.com. Click on the obnoxiously large button labeled, “Sign Up Now.” This will bring up a very short registration form.

One common mistake I’ve seen a lot is that people try to include things like dashes and underscores in the “Username” field. Letters and numbers only!

Also, don’t worry about making the “Username” short or easy to remember. This doesn’t necessarily have to be included in the URL of your new website.

You’ll be able to create as many blogs as you want with this one username, so you can continue to use this login next year (or use it for multiple blogs this year, if you need to create different sites for different classes).

Create the Blog

Once you complete the first page, you’ll be taken to a second short form that will allow you to physically create the website.

For the first field (Blog Domain), you should pick something short and easy to remember. I chose “rock08″ for this year’s website – my last name plus “08″ for the 2008-09 school year. Next year, I’ll use rock09, etc.

To get to your new site, the students will type in the phrase you see in the form (like rock09.wordpress.com). Short and easy to remember will make the site more accessible. Long and hard to remember just means that you’ll be working on the site and the students won’t bother to show up!

The second field, “Blog Title,” isn’t so important. Choose something catchy if you want. You can change that later without any trouble.

For the last option, Privacy, you may think it’s a good idea to keep your site out of search engines like Google. In theory, that increases privacy which you and/or your supervisor may desire.

I wouldn’t do that if I were you. After looking over my blogs stats, I’ve found that some students go to Google and type in things like “rock08″ and “rock08.wordpress.com” to find my site.

I’ve never had trouble with non-students finding the site and spamming it – so allowing it to be indexed by Google is just another way for your students to find your site.

And… You’re Done.

After submitting the last form, your site will be created!

Painless, eh? Chances are it took longer for you to read this part of the guide than it did for you to fill out those two forms.

You’ll want to follow the instructions to validate your email address, but otherwise you’re all set. WordPress.com just set up a new site for you, and it’s waiting for you to make it pretty and brimming with content.

You may want to click on the “Login” link and poke around the dashboard for a bit. When you’re done exploring, the next part of this guide will show you how to write up a post and publish it to your site.

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The site that we’re going to create will be both simple and flexible. We’ll start with some basic goals – giving students and parents access to information about the course – and you can build on that concept later.

As an example, take a look at the class website that I’m using for my US History course this year – Rockin’ American History. I created the site with a few goals in mind:

1. Provide a record of past assignments, for students that are absent or need to make up work.
2. Provide access to useful materials (test review, power point notes, assignment sheets, etc).
3. Provide an easy launching pad for computer-based activities, like webquests.
4. Provide parents with an alternate way to contact me and “check up” on their children.

The easiest system that allows me to achieve these goals quickly and efficiently is a blog. You can create and host a free blog at WordPress.com – that’s the home of my class site.

If you’re feeling brave, you can hop over to WordPress and just play around with the site. If not, let’s take a closer look at how my site works. Then we’ll get into how you can easily build your own.

What Is a Blog?

If you’re new to the Web 2.0 scene, you might be thinking, “What is a blog?”

The simplest definition is that a blog is a collection of posts or articles that are displayed sequentially – according to the date that they are published. If the basic goal for our class website is to keep a record of past assignments – and allow students to easily access those records – this is perfect.

Think of a blog as an “Assignment Log” or “Assignment Notebook” on the Internet. And on steroids.

When you look around the sample site you’ll notice three main sections: the main content area, a sidebar, and a header.

Main Content Area

The main content area is simply a list of all the posts that I’ve made to the site – displayed in reverse chronological order. The post that appears first is the post that I added last. More often than not, the first post on the list is therefore the most recent day of class.

Within these posts, you can include basic information as well as electronic documents. Do you have a pdf file or a slideshow you want to share with your students? You can upload that and include it in your daily post. Your students can then download the file later on.

This is more or less the backbone of the site. You type up information for the students, it’s published in this list, and the students can access it.

We could stop right here and achieve all four of our goals outlined above. Everything else (the sidebar and header) is just there to help you navigate this content.

Sidebar

The second most important part of our blog is the sidebar. In my case, it’s a thin band of information to the right of the main content area.

The sidebar includes a bunch of links and resources to help students navigate the site and find the information that they’re looking for.

The first item in the sidebar is a search box. If the student types in some information (like an assignment number), the search box will usually be able to bring up the information he or she is looking for.

The second item is probably the most useful item in the sidebar. It’s a custom list that I’ve created with links to a summary for each chapter. The link takes the student to a page that lists, succinctly, every assignment that should have been completed.

One of my colleagues asked me why I do this if all of the assignments are already in the Main Content Area. Because it makes things easier to find! The entire point of the class site is to make information more accessible to the students, so it only makes sense to take a few extra steps to make that information accessible with as few clicks as possible.

Other things in the sidebar include my contact information, a list of the most recent posts, a calendar so that students can find posts by a specific date, and a list of categories to help students sort through the information.

Header

The Header is pretty sparse on my site, but it has it’s own role to play. Besides being home to a pretty logo, it also contains a list of pages. In my case, that means “Home” and “About This Site.”

In case you didn’t pick up on that slight variation, a “page” is different from a “post.” Not a huge difference, but an important one nonetheless.

For the moment, we’ll explain the difference as this: a post appears in the list in the main content area, while a page does not. Instead, pages are usually listed somewhere near the top of the site. When you create a new page, the website automatically creates a new link and adds it to that list.

Pages are great for sharing information that isn’t tied to a specific point in time. For example, you might include a general page about writing research papers – links to academic sources, information about MLA citations, and tips for editing.

Let’s Start Building!

With that, we conclude our guided tour of the Rockin’ American History website. I hope it’s been informative.

All this techno-babble is probably boring you anyway, so let’s get to the good stuff. In the next step, we’ll create your very own website.

I promise it’ll be quick, easy, and painless.

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• Next: Creating a Site: Using WordPress to Build Your Class Website

No? That’s ok.

While those are all topics that a web designer would be highly familiar with and skilled in, you don’t need to know anything about any of them to build a class website. Using some freely available tools, you can build a great website with no prior knowledge at all – except how to click and type.

Over the next several pages, this guide will explore how to create a simple class website. It has been designed to be small in scope so that it is easy for a first timer to tackle. Despite its simplicity, you will find it to be incredibly useful and you can easily tailor it to your own needs.

The class site’s basic functions will be to allow students to easily access information and to open up a channel for communication with parents.

Oh, and it’s 100% free. I thought you’d like that.

This guide will be published throughout the week, at the rate of about one part per day. The estimated publication date for each part is in parentheses, and the table of contents here will be updated with links to each page as it becomes active. So check back daily or subscribe to the Teach Them Well RSS feed to keep up to date!

Table of Contents

1. Defining Goals: What Do We Want the Class Website to Do?
2. Creating a Site: Using WordPress to Build Your Class Website
3. Publishing Information: Posting Your First Assignment
4. Design Studio: Changing the Layout and Appearance of Your Site
5. Navigation: Setting Up the Sidebar of Your Class Website (01/20/2009)
6. Custom Navigation: Adding Custom HTML and Info to the Sidebar (01/21/2009)
7. Special Pages: Adding Pages (Not Posts) to Your Class Website (01/22/2009)
8. FAQ: Other Frequently Asked Questions About Creating a Class Site (01/23/2009)

Have you finished reading the guide? Did you make your own site yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Get to it!

If something is unclear or if you have any extra questions, feel free to drop a line in the comment area below or send me a private message via the Contact Form.

Homework completion rate at our school is pretty low, so it often happens that students arrive at the end of the semester with missing assignments (homework, classwork they didn’t finish, take home tests, projects, you name it). Periodically, I conference with the students to provide them with a list of assignments they’ve missed, but this is a drain on our classroom time.

I’ve created a simple class blog to record all of the assignments that we do so that students can keep up with their missed assignments – but most of them fail to realize they’ve missed the assignment unless I specifically show them the holes in my gradebook (which is electronic, Easy Grade Pro).

It’s an uphill battle, but making the gradebook available for students at any time – at home, in the library, on the computers in the back of the room – may help somewhat. At least I hope so.

My teaching roommate asked me a week or two ago if I could set up a website for him that allowed his students to check their grades online. I told him that I could, but it would be time consuming and I told him I wouldn’t do it. It got me thinking, though, so I started searching for online grading software.

Initially, I intended to find an open source grading program that I could host on a private server. Instead, I found what seems like a good, free online gradebook.

Engrade

The site I found was Engrade.

I haven’t used it live with a class yet, but I created a few dummy accounts to test what it’s like from both the teacher and student perspective.

Some of the highlights:

• AJAX enabled interface. Entering data into the score sheet is efficient. You can navigate around fields using the tab button or arrow keys, just like I would in a spreadsheet.
• Calendar of assignments with notes. This makes it easy to integrate the grading system with my existing class blog on WordPress. For each assignment, I can include a link back to the assignment on the class site, as well as any relevant days of class notes.
• Grade by points or weighted categories. Nothing special, but I’d say it’s a must have for grading software.
• Printable access codes for students. Students sign up with a special access code that you give them. This could be time consuming and paper wasting, but the site gives you an option to print out an automatically generated list. It prints a bunch of students on each page to conserve paper, too.
• Uber secure. The publisher takes security seriously – so much so that they’ve written two pages or so about it in the Help section. Beneath all the techno-babble, they basically say that their servers are as secure and backed up as you could imagine. Freak accidents happen, but you’re more likely to lose your gradebook or your flash drive than you are to have the database be compromised and/or permanently lost.

After playing around with it for a day or two, I’m definitely impressed. I think it has all of the functionality I need in a grading system without a lot of the unnecessary customizability. I shared it with my teaching roommate, and he’s gung ho about shifting his classes over to the new system in the next semester.

There is one downside that I’ve noticed so far: minimal ads. 

When I signed up as a teacher, I was excited to see that there were no ads. The layout is very clean, and it looks like a pretty well developed web app. When I created a student account, though,  I did notice a few advertisements.

They are pretty minimal AdSense ads. I only noticed them on two pages – the page listing the student’s classes and the messaging page. I’d prefer for there to be no ads at all, but I’d say these are within the realm of acceptability.

My teaching roommate already approached our department chair about it, and we’ve got tentative approval to start using it to track our students’ grades. I haven’t decided for certain, but I think I’m going to start the 3rd cycle fresh with this new system.

Too bad I didn’t think about this before Christmas break, or I could have used some of that time off to transfer the current marking cycle’s grades onto the new system. Doh!

I also plan on surveying the kids tomorrow to see what they think about the online grading system. I’m curious how many of them plan to use it to check their grades, and I’d also be curious to see if there are any students with security concerns.

Some people might scoff at it as little more than late night entertainment, but it’s news related enough that I’d rather my students watch this than just about anything else they might pick to turn on.

From a Social Studies vantage, I also love the fact that the show is full of references to history – both recent and not so recent. If you don’t know any history, you just won’t get some of the jokes.

And then of course… there’s NAMBLA.

Mid Term Elections, by the Daily Show

I was browsing through the Daily Show archives today, and I stumbled across this hilarious animated short.

It’s a spoof on School House Rocks. The topic is mid term elections, and how unimportant they are.

The video is a bit over-the-top for some classrooms, but I think I might use it in future election years. If nothing else, the point about incumbency is an all-too-imporant but oft-overlooked topic.

You know you want to play it in class…