This is my first year in a new district, and from what I've heard, I'm lucky to be there. Teachers went without a contract last year and many began looking elsewhere for jobs. Not surprisingly, the arts and foreign languages were held up as sacrificial offerings to the budget gods. Since Mandarin was just added because of a private grant, Latin and French were close to being cut. Thanks to some serious advocating, a budget override was passed, and my position as department director was created. There is a lot of work to be done to strengthen the department, and while financially things are looking better than they were last year, there are still little funds to be found. I decided that one way to simultaneously boost morale and articulate why our program is so important was by creating a website.
I'm a bit of a website-making addict. I have made a total of:
- 10 wikis on Wikispaces
- 4 websites on GoogleSites
- 4 blogs on Blogger
Each site serves a bit of a different purpose for me. Wikispaces is fantastic for uploading documents, and is collaborative, meaning that you can invite other people to work on the site with you. I've used Wikispaces for student projects (sample), and for sharing info on tech training within my school (sample). Overall, I found there was little collaboration from other staff members (whom I had hoped would share what they learned from the technology we had to use at school). It's also more utilitarian than some other sites, with less options for customization and making the site look sleek.
I use GoogleSite for two websites that I manage. One is my own site, http://www.catherineritz.org/, which I made to share professional info about myself and tech resources I use. The other is the AATF Eastern Massachusetts site I built this past summer: http://aatf-easternmass.org/. For both sites, I chose Google because I wanted them to present more "static" information. I didn't envision changing or updating them frequently, but wanted them to provide essentially one-sided information.
Finally, my blogs... I have two for my classes, since I teach both French and Spanish. I decided to use Blogger as a place to share student work. I like that I can embed voice-recordings, cartoons, flashcards and more on these sites. Compared to GoogleSites, I view these as more active sites that I would be updating regularly.
When I decided to begin working on the new website for my department, I initially created one in GoogleSites, thinking that it would be a place for parents and students to go to find general information about the department. I was actually almost done with it when I shared it with my colleagues for feedback. It just wasn't accomplishing what I had hoped...namely, to highlight was is so amazing about what we do (our teaching and professionalism!). I had put a news page on GoogleSites, but it was tucked away in the pages tab, and just didn't feel dynamic or exciting. The static information about our department just wasn't exciting enough to deserve first billing! That very night, I remade the entire site on Blogger, which allowed me to create pages for the more static information and put the daily teaching and professional news front and center. One major glitch I ran into was that Blogger interacts very badly with Internet Explorer. I had to change the tabs to "simple" to keep them looking good (no problems on Firefox or GoogleChrome).
Once I shared the site with my colleagues, they were quickly excited to tell me what was going on in their classrooms to post as news. My hope for the site is that it clearly articulates why our programs are so important, and why our teachers are important--showcasing their professionalism and creativity. If the budget crisis returns, the world language department and its teachers will not be abstract and easily dispensable, but rather something the district will feel pride in, as we will have opened our doors to make them a part of it.
http://arlingtonworldlanguages.blogspot.com/
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