Classroom Weblogs...

This week on the back of the Lewis Elementary newsletter we published a short update from each classroom teacher, and from our support teachers. These classroom notes are designed to give families a quick update of upcoming events, curriculum activities and topical information about our classrooms. The way we accomplished this is that we set up a community weblog using Moveable Type and had each teacher write a short piece about upcoming events for the coming week. We then edited the index page for the community blog and set it up so that each teacher's most recent post was listed on that page. Then we just copied and pasted the content into a Word template for publication. The interesting part of this is we did this because we wanted to easily collect the content in one place and as a result we now have a community weblog for our classrooms. Next we plan to create individual pages based on category tags in Moveable Type. This will allow each teacher to have a very simple web page with their weekly notes in the center and other content flowing into the sidebars.