Out with the old, in with the new!
August 1, 2009 | Posted in: Site Updates
The old EDvantaged.com Class Blog site
When I started teaching third grade at PGS five years ago, we used a website called Schoolnotes to give teachers a homepage. The site worked well for a while, but I found that it had a tendency to be unstable and to lose information. In April of 2005, I worked with a friend of mine (who is a web developer) to create EDvantaged.com. I hoped that, in addition to being the home of our new class site, EDvantaged would grow to be a site that would give educational technology resources for teachers and supportive materials and ideas for parents. Unfortunately, teaching really is a full-time job, and I have never really had time to develop the other elements of the site besides the class blog. A blog is a website that allows a person (or a group of people) to post periodic messages about any topic under the sun. There are blogs about cuisine, travel, science, and (of course) politics. The nice thing about blogs is that anyone can be a blogger about any topic, and some of the most obscure topics have developed the greatest followings on the internet.
Blogs are particularly good for classroom teachers like be, because they allow me to post regular updates about class news, activities, and assignments. The chronological ordering of blog posts provides a logical organization to the site’s structure. The Room 201 Class Blog was the online home of my third grade class for a little more than four years. Although moving to fourth grade gave me a good opportunity to build a new blog site, the change was long overdue. I found that the blog’s framework software, called LifeType, which was once at the forefront of blog administration, had become dated and clumsy to use when compared to newer frameworks (such as WordPress, which this site runs off). It also didn’t allow me to format the posts as easily as I wanted, which made posting updates a longer and more difficult process for me. Most notably, however, LifeType had security weaknesses that allowed for the possibility of the site being compomised – something that’s unacceptable when the content of the site is, among other things, for kids and about kids.
This new blog site uses the most modern blogging software available and has robust security safeguards. Here are some of the features of the new site that are either active now or soon to be active:
- Users need to be registered with accounts in order to post comments.
- Sensitive information will be restricted so that only registered and approved users can access it. (Coming soon!)
- Key content areas have been given special pages (see the top of the sidebar on the left side of the page).
- We now have a counter that shows how much money has been donated to Gifts of Love as part of our Room 209 C.A.R.E.S. program.
- Homework assignments and spelling words will be posted on the website. (Note: This is a pilot test to see whether students and parents find this to be helpful. Please give me feedback as the year progresses!)
- Users can setup RSS feeds in order to automatically deliver site updates to their web browsers. (Not sure what RSS is? Click here.)
- The search feature (top right of the site) is more effective than the search on the old site. (…hopefully!)
- Posts can be better organized into categories and sub-categories.
- Links for students and parents are better structured than on the old site. (Coming soon!)
- The new site looks more mature and visually-appealing, I think. (I didn’t design the color scheme or exact layout of the site, but I’d love feedback anyway!)
Finally, please consider using Mozilla Firefox to view this website. There are some nice formatting elements that are improperly shown or totally missing when the site is accessed with Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. (The problem lies with Internet Explorer’s inability to understand some forms of modern coding that are generally accepted by the web design community.) Besides being able to show the site the way it’s intended, Firefox is a great browser on its own!
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Martha
September 4, 2009
Mozilla is a good choice. The formatting gets a bit messed up in Safari as well, for those of you who might be using a MAC.