Classroom websites using Protopage

I must confess to some past and current confusion on the subject of classroom webpages. When I started teaching, the first website service that I heard talked about within the district was PBWorks (formerly PBWiki). Wiki pages were being used both in my PD sessions, and by my instructors for their own classrooms. Then, within a year, I started hearing about teacher training for the 1:1 netbooks, and the teachers were using Protopages. Soon after that, I heard about Moodle, and that was just sooo much better than wikis or protopages. Moodle was where it was at.

I waited to see what was going to be next.

I'm still waiting, but I also realize that I don't know enough about any one of them, and I"m never going to if I don't start using them myself. I re-arranged my schedule to take classes on Protopage and PBWorks this summer. I opted not to take the 2-day Moodle training at this time. I figured I needed to know the ins and outs of the simpler systems before I tried Moodle, which I understand to be more feature rich, but also to have a steeper learning curve.

I'm taking things at my own pace.

[And I won't even go into the thought that everything I've learned about blogging means they, too, can make great class webpages.]

Here's something I didn't know about Protopage. It is set up as an RSS reader service. This allows you to get automatically updated information from many different sources, and Protopage has done a lot of the technical work for you. All you do is set up a page and start adding widgets.

Tips for Creating a Protopage

Protopage has its own minimal Welcome protopage, with some instructions for customizing your page, if you like. You can also click on the Help/Support tab at the top right of the page (once you have one) and it will click through a set of Basic and Advanced slides to teach you about different features. Pretty straight forward.

What confuses me is exactly how other teachers are using their protopages, because I certainly didn't see the RSS Reader function being a big selling point for classroom teachers. And I don't think it is. I think the linking, bookmarking and image posting is most helpful, with the Tabs feature helping you divide functions, assignments, categories, etc. But the sticky note feature also seems to be incredibly powerful with students, using it as a message board for students to post their notes and read others'.

I guess it goes back to what it says on the logo. A classroom protopage, properly named, could be a great Start page for your class, a portal to all your online endeavors, like blogs, wikis, webquests, bookmarks, email services, other classrooms, just about anything. This image will give you an idea of some uses (if you need it bigger, click on it, and use View/Zoom In on your browser).

This is Oretha's homepage. Yes, she does have a 1:1 classroom, and I can see how posting daily assignments would work, especially if you have the protopage set as the homepage in each netbook browser. Students would just open the browser and get to work. If you look around, she has a tab for a Technology Survey (that page has links for each of her classes to take an online survey she created in Survey Monkey). She also has a window that shows her wiki page (she has both). On her wiki she posts classwork and homework assignments (updated daily) and can upload documents and files that students can download. I haven't seen a file-sharing feature in Protopage - or Blogger for that matter - yet.

Other examples:

An elementary teacher with a lot of information and links.

Here is a site for a school director of Math and Science. Talk about a lot of resources all in one place.

Protopage seems like a website that you can customize over time; easily deleting expired daily items, but building a vast library of resources over years.

One thing that came up in class - you have to log in to make changes to a protopage, but once logged in, you can change anything on it. If you are interested in getting kids to participate, it might be best to have a teacher/master protopage that YOU create and control, then a separate protopage for each of your classes that has a log in that can be shared. You could put a link to that page on your master site. This would allow students to post sticky notes (that they can label with their first names) and comment on a discussion, without allowing them to delete all your hard work. And a page for each class doesn't require students to register separately. If not by class, you might set up a page by project.

It's not a comprehensive post about protopages, because my understanding is still limited. I don't yet know what I'm going to put on mine. But if you check back in the fall, I'm sure I'll have something.