Making a Web page for your class can be simple or complex, depending on your purpose. It still involves rhetoric: ethos (a style, an image, hopefully an aid to credibility), logos (content, accurate and professionally presented), and pathos (emotion, tone, impact). Simple things like posting a make-up assignment or a summary of the week's work can still build a continuity in students' minds that wouldn't necessarily be there without your efforts on the Web.
- Here's an example of an uncomplicated class page, but even it involves choices about color, typeface, layout, and content that convey a style for the course and the teacher. What "personality" do you see when you click on this link?
Class pages often (usually?) represent the instructor communicating to the students, summarizing a week's or unit's work, impressions of the class's performance in the course so far, stating procedures, reminders of due dates, etc.
- Here's an example of an intermediate class page--a tone-setting summary impression of the class's ability level, an upcoming procedure, and due dates.
In more complex instances, class "pages" are webs, sets of interrelated and interlinked pages. Included materials may be a syllabus, a calendar, samples of previous students' work on assignments, a study guide, a "survivor's guide" to a course, and instructional materials.
- Here's the parent page for that last example.
Homework Challenge: Here's an exercise for the young, it seems. The term "class page" is used in K-12 to represent work for and by students rather than instructor rules. Like it says in the exercise, compare and contrast two.
Homework Challenge:
- Request a "staff" folder from your college IT staff--and probably remote access directions so you can place materials into the folder, such as updated web pages, from your office or from your home computer.
