I am building a new website for the brand new Physics AP course that I am teaching this year. The course is a blended model. Students access materials, worksheets and notes online and then we meet face to face once per week for tutorials and labs. Before jumping in to it i made a quick checklist of the things that I would like to accomplish with this site.In order of importance they are:
1)It needs to go up immediately!
2) Post notes and links to video lectures
3) Link to materingphysics.com for online assignments and quizzes
4) Link to additional resources such as applets and simulations which may help students.
5) Provide a forum for students to discuss problems and concerns
6) Increase avenues of student teacher communication
Overall I think that my needs would be best served by constructing a course on an LMS, such as moodle. However I have ruled out building a full-blown course on an LMS for a few reasons.
- Time is at a premium for me this year. Between teaching full time with 4 (count them 4!!!) new courses to prep and my MET coursework, I will not have the time to learn an LMS and create a course that I will be happy with right away.
- Since this is a blended course I will still be meeting with students face to face and so communication with students should not be a major concern
- We will be learning to use moodle later on in ETEC 565 and I just don’t want to spoil the surprise !
For these reasons, I have decided to build a standard website to complement my course. I have a limited experience building websites with Adobe Dreamweaver but I have decided to go a simpler route. Since my course site has very minimal requirements in terms of functionality (it is really just a nexus which links to other resources) I don’t feel it necessary to get into coding html, hosting my own site or using FTP. I have decided to build my site through googlesites for this year as a prototype with the idea that next year I will transfer it to a more powerful platform.
And….VOILA! https://sites.google.com/site/physicsap123/home
Like I said this is a bare-bones project for the time being. Having said that googlesites was definitely the way to go! I had the initial site up and running in about 30 mins. Another half our or so tracking down resources and linking them and I already have site that will see me through the first unit of my course. I am happy to keep things simple for now because in a way, the less stuff I add, the less chance that my website might suck.