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I remember attending the annual Florida Education Technology Conference
in 2000 and marveling at the huge number of companies that were
offering teachers the opportunity to put their classroom sites
on the web. It seemed like every other booth on the convention
floor was extolling the benefits of a classroom site and showcasing
the easy methods they provided for getting the job done. Teachers
were going to be provided with free templates, on-line page building
tools, and even free hosting space to get their classroom sites
up and running in "no time at all". It appeared as if
we were on the cusp of a revolutionary change in giving teachers
quick and easy solutions to getting information about their classroom
on the web. I expected to see thousands of new sites being published
full of student work, notes about assignments, and contact information
to provide greater interaction between the school and home.
Then I attended the 2001 conference and those same companies
were nowhere to be seen. What happened in the year that passed
between those conferences? With the bursting of the Internet bubble,
the companies which just one year before had hoped to support
their services with advertising, found that their business model
did not make economic sense. They quickly disappeared, leaving
many teachers high and dry and their classroom sites abandoned.
While a few companies offering web design and hosting for teachers
remained, most were now offering their tools, as a paid subscription
to teachers, and it seemed there was little interest among the
teachers attending in taking advantage of the solutions being
offered. The 2002 conference brought the message home even more
forcefully as offerings related to classroom websites all but
disappeared.
Still, teachers continue to recognize the value of building and
maintaining classroom websites, and the desire to post information
about their classes and students remains strong. When you combine
that desire with the growing expectation among parents that they
will have access to information about their child's classroom
through the web, it is readily apparent that there is a need for
a method to easily build and maintain a classroom site. Enter
Macromedia Contribute. Contribute directly addresses the two issues
that have hampered teachers in getting their classroom websites
posted on the web—the lack of time to learn web and graphics
design software in order to build the site, and the lack of an
easy way to keep the pages updated on the web. With Contribute,
both of those hurdles are removed, as the following examples will
show.
Finding the time for web design
A friend of mine once described teaching as a 12-month job squeezed
into a 10-month calendar. Teachers are always pressed for time—whether
it's creating lessons, grading tests and assignments, meetings
with parents, attending faculty and department meetings, studying
new methods for instruction, examining the requirements of mandatory
achievement tests, or keeping their grade books up-to-date. There
never seems to be enough time in the day to do all of the things
it takes to be a successful teacher—much less learn new
technologies. While many teachers have taken great strides in
the past few years in learning how to use modern software products
and in integrating the use of technology into their classroom,
the one area that has eluded many is the world of web design.
When even professional designers are struggling with the vagaries
of web design, it's no wonder that even the most well-meaning
teachers give up their pursuit of a classroom website when they
come up against one of the many problems in designing an attractive
site that is easy to maintain.
Contribute will fundamentally remove this hurdle. With an interface
that mimics many leading word processors, even a teacher who is
a novice in the use of technology will find it easy to build an
attractive site that can be changed with just a few clicks of
the mouse. Perhaps even more importantly, teachers will be able
to create all of their content in an application they are familiar
with, like Microsoft Word, import the document into their page,
and Contribute will take care of the rest. There's no need to
learn even a smidgen of HTML and the process even works in reverse.
Need to make changes to a page? Contribute allows the user to
open their source Word document, make their revisions, and then
return back to Contribute to post the page on their site. With
Contribute, there is no need for the teacher to learn any new
software product techniques or wrestle with uncooperative code
in order to get their pages built and online.
Schools will also find that Contribute lends their school website
a degree of professionalism and sophistication that many have
lacked in the past. Since Contribute works in conjunction with
the professional tools in the Macromedia MX Studio, the school
webmaster will be able to set up templates for their teachers
that maintain a common look and navigational scheme through every
page. By designing page layouts in Dreamweaver MX, graphics in
Fireworks MX, and interactive animations in Macromedia Flash MX,
the school and the contributing teachers will have a full suite
of assets at their disposal for creating the kinds of quality
web experiences that parents and members of the community are
accustomed to seeing on the web today.
Getting Online
The second major problem that has hampered teachers in the past
has been the availability of tools that allow them to keep their
classroom sites up-to-date. The process of finding a web host,
getting the file transfer software to function correctly, and
actually posting the correct files that need to go on the web
server to update a page may seem elementary to a professional
web designer. For teachers, however, the entire process has often
been a very frustrating one. Even with many states and school
districts offering free web hosting for teachers, the many ways
that the process can go wrong has often led teachers to throw
up their hands and surrender.
Contribute takes all of those problems out of the hands of teachers
and makes the process of transferring their files and updating
their site as easy as one or two clicks of the mouse. With the
methods that Contribute uses, teachers only need to click a single
file that the school webmaster has prepared for them to install
their connection settings, and then click a single button when
they want to update a page. What once was a terrifying proposition
for many, now becomes as easy as opening an e-mail from a friend.
Whether the school uses their own server, the school district's
server, free web space proved by the state, or a commercial service,
the entire process has been demystified and happens with little
effort on the part of the contributing teacher.
Conclusion
For teachers who have long desired a way to get information about
their classroom online, Contribute finally provides a solution
that is affordable, easy, and even fun. While the benefits
of
classroom websites have long been acknowledged, the reality until
now has always been that the process was too time-consuming
and
too difficult for most teachers. With Contribute, teachers will
finally have at their disposal a tool that will allow them
to
easily attain the benefits of a classroom site. Contribute will
allow teachers to take advantage of the power of the web to:
- Keep parents informed of upcoming events through calendars
and online announcements.
- Keep parents informed of student assignments and responsibilities.
- Provide an easy way for teacher/parent communication through
e-mail links.
- Provide a way for relatives and family members to stay in
touch with the class, no matter how far away they live.
- Encourage students to take pride in their work since it will
be viewed by a worldwide audience.
- Offer a way to reward students for hard work by listing their
accomplishments on the Internet.
- Provide a way for parents and other people to e-mail teachers
using links within the web page.
- Connect the teacher with other educators.
- Encourage use of technology by students and parents at home.
- Allow students a way to publish their work so that anyone
with Internet access can view it.
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