Build My Site for Free

Hi.   Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com.  In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show teachers, professors, instructors – anyone who teaches a class – how to set up a website for their classroom. Now what I think is so great about this is it’s allowing you to connect with students and their parents on a totally different level.  You’re keeping the classroom fun; you’re engaging your students; and if you have a blog on your website, it allows your students to further their writing skills as well as their computer skills.

So first, what you want to do is come to WordPress.org and download a version of WordPress to start your
website.  Next, once you have downloaded and installed WordPress, come to BuildMySiteForFree.com for some really cool
themes to make as the background of your website.  So here, we have a few teacher education
themes that are actually really cool. For example, Cute Seasons WP Theme. We have a very nice kid-friendly KidPaint theme.  And even In the Classroom School WP Theme that really looks like it’s a classroom. So there are some great themes out there that you can make as the
foundation of your blog.

Next, what I would do after you have created the theme for your website is to install some really cool plugins.  And I came to the WordPress.org plugin directory, and there’s a great plugin for teachers called The Lesson Plan Book.  This allows you to record lesson plans with details and instructions for your students, even add files for your students to then download.  And what’s really great about this is students that are absent can come to your website and look at your lesson plan and get all the info that they missed out on that day.

Another really great plugin is the Lazyest Gallery plugin, which can also be found in the WordPress plugin directory.  This plugin, among others such as like NextGEN gallery or Page Flip Photo Gallery allows you to upload PowerPoint slides and even classroom photos. So what’s great is they can sort through folders and look at pictures of them in their classroom. They can even, if they missed out on anything, they
can look at the PowerPoint slides or even use them for homework or tests.  So this is a really great plugin that allows you to add thumbnail pictures or even a really cool slideshow.

Finally, as you added themes and plugins, what I suggest is to use RSS feeds to update and inform both students and parents.  So you can come to widgets that can be found under the appearance setting on your navigation menu, and you can scroll down and in alphabetical order, you will find RSS.  So what you want to do is click the RSS and then drag it and drop it in the widget area that you would like on your website.

Then what you can do is insert a URL link and give it a title, which allows you to set out homework assignments, schedule test dates, or even a classroom newsletter.  So it’s a really great way to keep your  students informed about what’s going on in the classroom as well as the parents.

Finally, now that you have installed your WordPress version, you created some themes and plugins and even possibly use an RSS widget to update and inform your students and their parents, what you want to do is make sure you’re protecting your students as well, especially when you’re using the Internet.

So my first suggestion is to make all the students have the user role as contributor.  This means that if you are using a blog, they are able to write posts, but they won’t be able to publish them until you approve the post.  A second suggestion is make it subscriber access only.  This
way, no one else can access your website or blog, except the students and their parents that are subscribed.  Finally, don’t give out any school or student information.  Instead of writing the school’s name, maybe add a different fun name to it.  For instance, A Classroom in New York or something where no one will be able to find the location of your school.  And instead of using the children’s names, what you could do is give them a student  ID number or even an avatar.

And this video’s been brought to  you by BuildMySiteForFree.com, and it’s how to start a website for a classroom.  Please stay tuned for more
videos.  Thank you.