Station Stop: ICE Conference (Follow-Up!)

A huge thank you to all who attended my presentation, "Classroom Websites Made Easy," yesterday at the Illinois Computing Educators annual conference! I really appreciate the enthusiasm of the participants- despite the technology problems we had! Our googlepage site decided not to load properly throughout the presentation (and yes, this was the essence of the presentation) but we rolled our way through it and I hope those of you who were able to attend left with some great tips for your own classroom websites!

I would also like to thank all the people working with ICE conference for the excellent organization this year! I am always impressed at the incredible diligence and forethought the committees have and the attention to detail. I am already looking forward to next year!

If you missed the presentation you can download my handouts and outline to the link at the left. Googlepages has been an incredibly easy and FREE way to create classroom websites and I encourage you to test the waters at creating your own class website. Stay to tuned to Teacher Tracks for more details of my journey through education!

It all starts with your google account.

Not just a search engine anymore; google offers numerous services for its users- tools that have great applications for teachers and the classroom.

Among my favorite include blogger, google page creator (where I curently make and house my class website and team website), gmail, picasa web albums, igoogle, google maps, google reader, and google docs- and that's not even the half the "cool stuff" available.

You can't have any of the fun without registering for a google account though, so if you haven't registered for one at http://www.google.com/ or http://www.gmail.com/ then do it now!

Note: If you are thinking of making a website using googlepages for a team, where you want multiple people to be able to edit the pages you may want to create a generic account with fake names and information so that multiple people can use the information. Yes, this will mean that you will have log in and out of your personal google account to access your team account (which is kind of a pain) but that way team members won't get your personal information.