Mr. Higgins’ Blog

Part 1

As someone who is entirely too organized almost all of the time, there is a lot of house cleaning I find myself going through when it comes to how to organize my school website. My school website is power by Drupal which thus far is my favorite content management system because of the current capabilities AND the hopes for the future.

Here is the lowdown on the way I built the website…

1. I have six classes which include
   Algebra II
   Web Development
   Advanced Web Development
   Operating Systems
   Introduction to Programming: Visual Basic
   AP Computer Science
   
2. Each student will have their own login name and password on the website and will only be able to access the FRONT PAGE and THEIR CLASSES.i.e. SuzieQ is in AP Computer, she can only see the AP Computer
3. Each class website (once logged in) contains a forum and a class blog. The forum will be use for teacher proposed questions mainly because students can email me if they have questions. I will update the class websites will only information that pertains to that class. For instance, the Algebra II class does not need to know my advice given to an AP Computer class.
4. The front page is a blog, in a way. Not the reflective writing blog, but a homework blog that I will basically post what the homework was for that specific day and perhaps a few words of encouragement.

This seems like a very simple and logical design (if it wasn’t…my hair would no longer be attached), but there is always something to tweak before the school year.

Part 2

As a master of educational technology student, my professor during a summer Instructional Design course used a wiki for the class. I certainly was well aware of wikis; however, I did not really understand the point of being able to edit basically any content. I have now seen the light….the wiki can be used to reinforce the HTML background of my Web Development students and give them a chance to contribute to the class with something that really interests them. If I was a student, my page would probably be something like “Sports Records” or “Sports Moments” (because I obsess over sports). I use MediaWiki because it is the backbone of Wikipedia and I wanted something that the students had already seen.

My first year of teaching is going to be challenging enough, I think I might stick with just having 2 periods of Web Development hack away at the class wiki because I want to get a little more experienced before I open it up further.

The drupal website and class wiki take up a lot of my preparation and I want to make sure that technology does not come before pedagogy.