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USING INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES TO IMPROVE COMMUNICATION

Learning Outcomes

Learn technologies that can assist you in communicating effectively with colleagues, parents, and students.
Understand important attributes of useful websites, and how to use them to communicate effectively.
Build a personalized teacher website and portfolio.

Overview

As a teacher, effectively communicating with your students—and their parents—is critical to learning success. If students do not understand or remember their assignments, students cannot complete the assignments. In addition, every opportunity for a teacher to give feedback, mentoring, and guidance is an opportunity for students to learn.

There are many ways that Internet-based technologies can assist teachers in communicating effectively. We will discuss a few in this lessons.

Class Websites

In the 21st century, every teacher should have a functioning website where students and parents can access information, assignments, forms, policies, and class announcements/due dates. Some school districts (but not all) provide an online web space for teachers, but many teachers feel these are clunky and not useful and end up linking to their own personal website anyway. Having your own website means you have control over what and when you can post to your students. At the end of this lesson, you will have the opportunity to create your own website. Past IPT 286/371 students have told us this is one of their favorite assignments because they feel it is so useful.

There are different kinds of websites and website builders, and each has its pros and cons. The following are a few different ones you could use to complete your assignment.

Wix is one of the most versatile and powerful plug-and-play website builders out there. And the site features its own fantastic tutorials!

Classic Google Sites: Websites made through Classic Google Sites do not always have the greatest visual appeal, but many teachers use Google Sites because of its functionality and integration with other Google products. There is also a New Google Sites, which tends to look a little slicker. We don't recommend it, however, because its functionality does not allow you to complete all requirements for the assignment in this course.

Wordpress: This creates blogs like Blogger does, but Wordpress blogs are much more powerful. In fact, many businesses run their entire website on Wordpress.

Blogger: In addition to merely communicating information, many teachers use blogs to make students creators or co-creators of online class content. You can find out more information about using blogs in the classroom by clicking on this link.

Learning Management Systems

If you have already created a website of your own, a Learning Management System (LMS) could be a good alternate assignment for you. Even if not, it is good to be aware of LMSs because of how widely they are used in schools, and because you could complete an LMS badge for a future assignment. An LMS is a tool like Blackboard, Canvas, or BYU’s Learning Suite. Because they are essential to online teaching, this option is discussed at length in a special section of IP&T 373 taught by Charles Graham, which focuses on Online and Blended Teaching. Right now, I will mention that if your school district isn’t using one of these tools and you would like to, you can consider using one of the following tools:

Google Classroom has minimal features, but covers the basics that a teacher needs. It used to be available in school districts, but is now available to the general public. Learn more about Google Classroom by watching this video.
Canvas is the LMS on which this course and all BYU-Online courses are administered. While BYU (and many of the schools in which our students will teach) has a purchased, institutional subscription to the service, Canvas is also Free for Teachers. You can sign up for an account by visiting canvas.instructure.com.
Edmodo is another great option. Edmodo is like Facebook, but for education (and thus a way to keep personal and professional lives separate). Learn more about Edmodo by watching this video.
Versal is another tool for creating easy online learning. Check out Versal's Youtube Channel to learn more.
Schoology and Coursesites are also free LMSs for teachers, but they are not as widely used as Canvas.

Social Media

You most likely use social media for yourself, but what about for teaching? One thing to consider is that sometimes the best way to communicate with parents and students is to use the tool they use themselves. It may not make sense to have announcements in an LMS if they don’t ever log in to read them. Tools like Twitter can be a great way to send out quick information bits about your content to your students. By using Tweetdeck, you can schedule your tweets ahead of time. So, for example, you could schedule reminders on homework assignments, and then because you can subscribe to Twitter through SMS, students would get these reminders through a text on their phones. Even Facebook is looking into how it can better support education.

Of course, social media interaction between teachers and students can raise some concerns about privacy, professionalism, and internet safety. You will learn more about how to mitigate these concerns in a professional way in IP&T 372, which is currently required for elementary education majors but optional for secondary education.

Internet Safety and Passwords

You will learn more about Internet safety in IP&T 372. However, it’s worth mentioning a few things here while we are on the topic of Internet communications. This 5-minute summary of a recent BYU Devotional discusses some of the most common Internet security concerns and how to be prepared for them.

As you create more and more accounts on the internet, passwords become very important, but also harder to manage. What makes the best password? Remember, a good password

is easy for you to remember. Having to write your password on a sticky note in your binder does no good!
is difficult for a computer program to try and figure out (which is what hackers do to harvest passwords).

Here are some strategies for creating passwords that are both easy to remember and hard to crack:

Think of a favorite scripture or phrase. Four words is sufficient to be practically uncrackable. For example, maybe your phrase is "ButtonsDonutsSocksCheetos", "RoaroftheCougars" or a phrase like "IWillGoandDo."
Think of a phrase and then rewrite it using special characters. So the phrase "I love to eat donuts" becomes "1L0V3t0e@td0nut3"
Check your password strength at this website.
Now, whichever strategy you use, make this your master password. Then to make a unique password, just add something to the end. This way, you can have different passwords for each program, which is very important, but it's still easy to remember because it's all based on the same master password. So using the first strategy above, if I were making a Gmail password, I might do this: "IWillGoandDo_gmail." For Facebook it would be "IWillGoandDo_FB"
Use a password program, where you make a super tough password that unlocks the program, and then the password program makes really random passwords automatically for all your other websites. If you go to a website, you use your master password to unlock the program, which then auto-fills in the password for that specific website. This is great because you can have truly unique and tough passwords for each program, and only have to remember one. But don't forget that one, or you're in trouble! Here's a review of some popular programs.

Assignments

Complete all assignments associated with this module on your Canvas Home Page.