Building a Teacher Website

Benefits of building a teacher website

1) Store your content on your web-space regardless of changes in your schools technology choices.

2) Have more control over the content (HTML is very flexible compared to Schoology).

3) Embed existing content into Schoology from your webpage (no need to recreate pages).

4) Available to the general public if permitted (no need for passwords to access reading material and useful links).

5) Promote your work

Neocities ( https://neocities.org ) is a free(and open source) web hosting service with many options for those wishing to learn HTML. It provides 1GB of free web space for an indefinite amount of time. Your url will be http://whatevernameyouchose.neocities.org

The only two drawbacks (in the distant future) are;

1) if you want to make dynamic content (such as a website that stores student responses – this is no possible with free Neocities).

2) it isn’t easy to make a backup of your website unless you keep a backup copy of your files on your computer or thumb-drive.

Once you learn more HTML you will be able to tweek your website however you like.

The simplest way to generate a webpage is to use any Word Processor (Microsoft Word, Open Office or LibreOffice). You can export any word document to an HTML file.

Neocities has a built in HTML editor, however it is best to use an offline HTML editor in order to have a backup of your files on a computer.

Your can create a folder to store your files. That folder will then be located here http://whatevernameyouchose.neocities.org/foldername

You can then upload your document (html file) to that folder

http://whatevernameyouchose.neocities.org/foldername/filename.html

It is best to avoid any capital letters in folder and file names as users often convert everything to lowercase.

If you need to link to another file, be sure to use the URL to link to that file. You can create a hyperlink in a word document to link to another webpage.

Once a webpage or set of webpages have been created, a folders containing the files can be uploaded(drag-and-drop) into the Neocities site. That will make all the content accessible from the internet.

HTML files can be edited to create various content including interactive games.

Important Elements of a Teacher Website

• Bio / Resume

• Classroom rules

• Reading resources (PDF files can be viewed in a webpage – make sure you have the rights to publish)

• Embedded Google Form of tasks/quizzes e.t.c.

• Student work samples

• Videos (embedded YouTube links or direct uploads*)

• Useful Links (links to other websites)

• Later…….. Interactive content!

PDF Example

It is better to leave academic calendars and announcements in whatever platform your school uses (e.g. Schoology) as these push out notifications to students. You want to avoid any double-maintenance!

* NB – video files can be rather large however if you have video content that is important to you, such as vocabulary, and if the files size is relatively small (~20 MB), you can upload it directly to your webspace.

A simple tutorial on Neocities and HTML: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoO6rg45mQs

The example webpage that is generated by Neocities: sample.html

An example website: https://4thgreekmath.neocities.org