Final Vision Project Rationale

Image retrieved from emaze.com

Well, I have decided to create a classroom website instead of a blog for my final vision project. After some reflection on which platform is better, and with the help and advice of some of my teacher friends, I opted for a site that is private and only the members you add can view it. I decided to choose Shutterfly Share Sites as my website platform. I also like how websites have pages or tabs to organize different categories or content information.
https://www.shutterfly.com/classroom-share/

It is interesting the way I came to this decision. I even set up an online survey that I posted last week to my blog. I also shared this survey on Facebook, and tagged teacher friends with the link, in order to get their opinion. Many of them use Weebly or Wordpress but those are all open sites. Then I remembered a previous blog post I had written about a teacher friend from last year who had shown me Shutterfly Class Share. It is private and only members can view it, add photos, or include reminders.

Image retrieved from Slide Share

This privacy factor is important for me because my audience is going to be my parent group at my school. Some parents want their children’s privacy protected but still want to see them share their learning at school. I wanted to create an online platform to communicate with parents other than email. I wanted a way to post pictures of their children engaged in classroom activities that was in a safe and controlled environment. I find email is tedious to attach pictures all the time so I am hoping this website will allow me to communicate and show student learning more effectively with my parents. This website also has a calendar option to input important dates, will notify members when updates or posts are made, and provides the contact details of all the parents in the class for easier communication with each other.

This platform is going to have some complications with sharing the assignment with our class in LIBE 477 but for the benefit of my parents, students, and to keep their privacy secure and safe, I feel this is the best choice.

I have a large group of ELL parents who communicate with each other in their native language. But then they rely on one of my class parents who can translate and relay messages onto me. We as the teachers try to accommodate as best we can to meet the needs of our parents, but my worry is that if they rely too much on a translator, the language barrier will remain. I know many of the teachers at my school use email, websites, and blogs to communicate so this method of communication from teacher to parent will continue as their children move through our school and into the older grades. We as teachers want our parents to be able to support their children at home with school related academics and we want to be able to help parents achieve this. We try to accommodate as best we can to meet the needs of our parents, so I am hoping that a class website, like Shuttefly class share will be beneficial to my class parents. I am hoping with the pictures, calendar option, and weekly posts I make including links and visuals, the parents will be better able to understand what their child is doing at school. Having someone to translate is wonderful but I want my ELL parents to also feel independent, included, informed, and not intimidated by English communication systems. I want to make it as easy as possible for them to feel up-to-date and our communication with each other to be more simple, clear, and understandable. Other teachers also note in these two articles, Building relationships with Families of ELLs and Increasing Parental Involvement of ELL students how communicating with parents through a class website (or beyond face-to-face interaction) can be a place to help parents refer to information that was misunderstood, about upcoming events, assignments, or to see snapshots of their child’s learning in action. If teachers make the effort to reach out to parents by keeping them informed in various ways, parents are more likely to reciprocate the communication and feel involved in their child’s life at school.

Image retrieved from Google images

Tip for teachers: The Shutterfly class share site also has an iPhone app so I can easily upload photos to the website straight from my phone the moment I take the pictures or videos of the students in my class.

Here is an example of what the Shutterfly class share website can look like. It provides examples of the various page tabs you can have, what you can include in your calendar, how to use the parent volunteer sign-up section, and other various options. This example was pulled right from the Shutterfly Classroom Share webpage.

Image retrieved from Pinterest.com

Despite the many wonderful features of this website platform I am still left with some concerns and thoughts as to how I will share this with my peers from this course. A suggestion was to make a “How to” video explaining the set-up of this website for other teachers to view and learn about. I love this idea, as it will allow me to learn about and explore another helpful teaching tool- videos and screen shares. In addition, I can then share my website in a manner without compromising the privacy of my students and parents. I still have more to learn, explore, and discover is how to make a screen share video, but I am eager to get started and share my findings with you all in next week's blog post.

Bibliography

Feriazzo, J. (January 30, 2016). Building relationships with Families of ELLs. Education Week Teacher. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2016/01/response_building_relationships_with_families_of_ells.html

Haniff, R. (2014). Increasing Parental Involvement of ELL students. Univerisity of Toronto publication. Retreived from https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/.../1/Haniff_Rabeena_B_201406_MT_MTRP.pdf

Shutterfly Classroom Share sites. Retreived from https://www.shutterfly.com/classroom-share/