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Volume 9, Number 9: Summer 2003

Creating an Online Environment for Teachers:
Project "The Learning Workshop"

by Claudia Rinaldi,
UW-Whitewater

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Technology literacy is increasingly an integral part of public school education that includes teachers, administrators, other professionals and parents (Bernshausen & Cunningham, 2001). According to Becker (1998), word processing and the Internet may be the most valuable computer technologies used in school. Teachers have begun to use email regularly, and students are involved more each day using the Internet for research and communication (Becker, 1998). In fact, Lewis (1998) stated that the Internet not only allows for dissemination of curriculum but also for communication, because it decreases the social barriers that keep teachers, parents, and students from communicating.

The LearningWorkshop.com was developed to address the K-12 communication and technology standards curriculum. Johnson (2000) suggests that students' learning can be enhanced when teachers and parents keep close communication. Project TheLearningWorkshop.com provides an efficient method for teachers to communicate with students and parents via the Internet. The objectives of the project were to (a) identify the needs of teachers to integrate the Internet into their daily activities and (b) create a website that provided them with the tools they needed in order to use it. The project identified the need of teachers and the current demands of the use of technology addressed by the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for teachers.

A needs assessment identified different technology interests and abilities of teachers. The project identified certain tools that would bring teachers, parents and students together in one place. The tools included class web page/newsletter, an online gradebook, class calendar, class emailing capabilities, message/discussion board, parent and student access, lesson plans/strategy sections, submission of articles and practices, and teacher-to-teacher communication accessibility.

During its development, professionals in the fields of educational technology, regular, and special education were interviewed and consulted, and the result was www.TheLearningWorkshop.com.
Active since July 2000, TheLearningWorkshop.com is comprised of tools for teachers, parents, and students that include an online grade book, message/discussion board, a calendar, class emailing, tutor section. In the past year, TheLearningWorkshop.com has enjoyed great response locally, as well as from the nation and the rest of the world. As of July 2002, TheLearningWorkshop.com had 5,252 members, including 3302 teachers, 1870 students and 80 tutors. The breakdown of users included teachers from kindergarten to college and was as follows: Kindergarten (n=246), 1st -5th grade (n= 1286), 6th -8th grade (749), 9th -12th grade (643), technical (n=45), undergraduate (n= 148), graduate (n=31) and other (n=154). There are 48 states represented and 5 nations around the world. The site has also been reviewed by DiscoverySchool.com, Classroom Connect.com, Teach-a-nology.com , and another 30 sites on the web representing many of the leading teaching and learning sites on the Internet.

At UW-Whitewater, we have been using the site's discussion/message board to follow in-service teachers who register for action research classes as a way to provide mentoring from faculty, other professionals, and other inservice peers in a variety of subjects. Our hope is that this mentoring will promote professional development, as well as help in the retention of special education teachers in the state of Wisconsin, a recommended practice identified in the literature (Bernshausen,D. & Cunningham, C., 2001).

What makes TheLearningWorkshop.com different is its functionality. To use the service, most teachers have required minimal instruction, and students and parents have reported minimal problems using it for communication with their teachers and college professors. The website has been fully debugged for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator browsers and on both Mac and PC platforms. Therefore, it allows all users--no matter which technology they use--to communicate in efficient ways that can enhance a professional and education relationship in the classroom.

For teachers, the site provides access whenever and wherever it is convenient for them--at home, at work or wherever they have a connection to the Internet. The teacher can print access information for her/his students, add calendar events such as test days, assignments due, parent trainings, back to school night, and/or professional and parent conferences and trainings. The teacher has the ability to add any number of assignments and to weigh them based on points or percentages. The teacher also has access to all of the students/parents email addresses and can send emails directly from the site. In addition, teachers can use their class message board to put academic, study skills or behavior strategies, and additional information regarding any topic of their choice. Typically, teachers have ten assignments and three classes registered with the site.

For students and/or parents, the website has two password protected steps, which circumvents concern about other parents or students seeing each student's information. Once students have gained access to their class, their home page diplays calendar events, message board/discussion postings, and up-to-date grades all in one page. In addition, it allows contact via the message board with the teacher to discuss assignments, strategies, and/or resource information at any time of the day.

Information specific for parents is available through the parents' section, where they can find helpful articles on assessment, standards, and strategies for helping with homework and incomplete assignments.

The section on tutors allows parents to have access to professionals in the area of education and special education that live near them. Although anyone can register tutoring services for free on the site, our disclosure suggests that parents check tutors' references and monitor their progress. Parents can use this section by searching by subject area, zip code or a number of specialties.

During program evaluation, user feedback generally fell under the following topics:

1. The site is something that teachers find useful and easy to use;
2. The site serves well as a simple way to begin moving teachers towards the idea of online tools for data storage, database creation, word-processing, presentation, and grading;
3. Teachers know that this is the way of the future in education and that the site serves a good way to become prepared;
4. Users identified prompt technical support;
5. The website meets national technology standards for teachers.

Additional evaluation efforts are on the way for identifying demographic information, computer standards addressed, and computer skills of the users are on the way. An intervention study on the use of interactions for parents using the site will begin this fall and findings will be reported later this year.

For the future, we are awaiting grant funding to enhance the site to include a personal class or school pages, strategies for academics and behavior management, the ability to upload documents such as presentations, batch downloading and/or uploading student information, online-tests that integrate with the gradebook, and a class links section.

TheLearningWorkshop.com has proven that teachers are interested in enhancing their technology skills, using online sites to make their jobs more efficient, and, regardless of the distances that separate them, in building communities of teachers and learners. We hope that TheLearningWorshop.com can continue to provide these resources for teachers, parents and students.


References

Becker, H. J. (1998). How are teachers using computers in the classroom? Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association. (Found in http://www.crito.uci.edu/tlc/FINDINGS/special3/)

Bernshausen, D. and Cunningham, C. (2001). The role of resiliency in teacher preparation and retention. Teacher Education presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.

Johnson, D. (2000). Teacher web pages that build parent partnerships. Multimedia Schools, 7(4), 48-52.

Lewis, J. D. (1998). How the Internet expands educational options. Teaching Exceptional Children, 30(5), 34-42.

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