Tag Archives: wordpress

Using WordPress for your classroom web site

kinderabbyAbby Boruff, kindergarten teacher at Clive Elementary, was looking for an easy way to post photos for her classroom. After trying a wiki, edublogger, and other sites, she has  landed with wordpress.com.  Visit her classroom website, Abby’s Kinder Adventures, at:  http://kinderabbyb.wordpress.com/

Here’s the key feature sets that she wanted for her classroom website…..

Easy ability to load sets of photos.

According to Boruff, “Photos are the key to connecting parents to your classroom.”  Parents want to see what’s happening in your classroom and photos are the easiest way to for them to connect.   Boruff takes a lot of photos of classroom activities and WordPress allows her to upload all of the photos at once, even making gallery sets at the time they are uploaded.

Ability to see what content is most popular

WordPress sites come with several built in usage and stats reports that enable Boruff to easily see what posts, photos and content is most popular.  This is helpful because she can track which posts and content get the most visitors.  This means she can spend time on content that she knows that parents will be interested in.

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What do you use to take most of your photos?

She primarily uses an iPad for her classroom photos and videos.

How do you transfer your photos and videos to your computer?

simple transferShe uses the app called  Simple Transfer.  Once the app is on your iPad, the app provides you with an ip address that can be typed into a web browser on an other machine  – and immediately pulls up your current photos and videos to be able to copy them to your computer.

If you’re looking for another great example of a classroom website using WordPress, visit PolkaDottedCanvas, http://polkadottedcanvas.wordpress.com/ , which is run by Alicia Eggers, Clive Elementary Art Teacher.

Featured on WordPress.com Education

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Our district’s tech blog was recently listed in two articles from WordPress.com:  Create an A+ Site with WordPress.com Classrooms  & Make the Grade: Classroom WordPress Sites   I’m excited to see WordPress extend their reach into classroom/educational usage.  They’ve even added new security features to allow teachers to select certain pages/posts to be password protected, which will be helpful for classroom lists and student directories.

Our district has been a huge advocate for WordPress – as we’re not only using WordPress for our district tech blog, as our entire district website (www.wdmcs.org) is also a WordPress site.  In addition, we’re working our way through each of our fourteen schools to shift them to the usage of WordPress as well.  Check out our school web sites that are now using WordPress:  Clive Elementary, Westridge Elementary, Jordan Creek Elementary