Week 3- My Blended Environment

This week we had to research different websites and options to host our blended classroom. When looking at each option I had to find something that addressed a few points:
1. It must log my information, unit plans, and  resources without discarding them year to year.
2. It needs to be interactive with discussion forums, comments, blogs, or chat allowing my students to communicate about classroom material outside of the school.
3. I want something that keeps them posted about school activities, grades, and announcements for other classes as well.

My conclusion for now (As it will evolve as we go, I'm sure.)  is to utilize 3 websites into one.

https://www.edline.net/Index.page
http://www.edmodo.com/home
https://www.box.com/

I am currently using edline as a daily log of assignments, activities, grades, quizzes and announcements. My team is also increasing their web presence on edline this year and a goal of ours is to keep kids involved online for all of our classes. Therefore I will be using that as a main hub for my class. In addition to this however, I'm going to my a link to Edmodo.com for specific assignments and daily discussions for students to converse about what's going on in class. If I have a discussion question or a chat session I will post it on edline in the assignments and have students link to the edmodo site to participate.  I will also have students doing polls, surveys and other assignments using edmodo. As a storage center, I'm going to use either box.net or drop box.

Some of the negatives that I have encountered so far using edline as a main site for student involvement are the following; it is not interesting, appealing or modern and students do not feel entertained while exploring it, there isn't a discussion application or chat feature for student interaction, and each year it dumps all of your files. A downfall about Edmodo is that it's not directly linked to your gradebook. It's not used in all classes like edline  and parents may not check it as often as or even want to check it.

My idea is evolving as I am also trying to build a wix site that I can use next year. I'm trying to design several PBL style units to use that will be both common core and technology based.  However it is NOT ready for this years blended attempt.  It will be a lot like my blended portfolio site that I'm working on http://dkvance.wix.com/vancescience#!home/mainPage


My pages so far.....

EDLINE

Edmodo