The educational system is evolving. The learning process becomes a bit more blended and complicated for students. Teachers look for new ways to provide additional after-school and in-class assistance. This is where a classroom website may be a good solution. It serves multiple tasks right at once. In addition, it is a more flexible way to interact with students, engage with parents, etc.
The key problem here is a lack of skills. A few school teachers have the knowledge to cope with the website building process unless they teach programming or web design. Budget limitations appear to be the second stumbling block on the way to classroom digitization. Hiring web developers to build a teacher website may cost thousands of dollars.
Modern web technologies come as the ultimate solution. They introduce new tools designed to suit non-technicians and newbies at minimum cost. In other words, you get an instrument to create a classroom website in minutes without coding.
Why Teachers Need a Classroom Website?
To understand, how the future website can be used by both students and teachers, you need to clarify the project’s purposes. The key idea here is to make your site more focused. Why do you need a website? Is it to control your students remote your students, engage with their parents pr promote curriculum?
Let’s have a look at some popular reasons why teachers might want to create a school website.
No matter why teachers want to have a site, they want it for the sake of students. So, the first reason is to promote their curriculum and make it more enhanced. The key idea is to provide hassle-free online access to the educational plan or program.At the same time, absent students may enter the website and access all necessary materials with a click instead of missing vital information.
A website may have additional info resources attached as well as links to other educational websites. They may come in handy when users complete writing tasks with works cited necessary to include. Moreover, teachers may use the site as a hub for upcoming tests, quizzes, spelling lists, etc.
Classroom websites can be used as a tool to encourage. For example, a teacher may publish a list with the most successful students featuring monthly weekly updates. The idea is to keep students involved in the learning process and do their best to score 10 out of 10 during the next test. Turn the studying process into the form of educational competition.
Parents are always eager to know what their kids are actually learning. They want to keep in touch with subjects children study as well as information about teachers and staff to know their kids are in good hands. A website will let parents track their children’s success. At least, they will be able to react in case something goes wrong.
As you can see, having a teacher website may appear to be a turning point in the educational process. All you need is a website building platform with enough instruments to meet the teacher’s requirements considering the above-mentioned benefits. Wix is certainly worth paying attention to. Let’s have a look at how long and how much t will take to create a school website using Wix web functionality.
5 Steps to Build a Teacher Website
Wix – is a software with the reputation of probably the easiest website builder. At least, it certainly helps to create sites of any type from scratch. Moreover, it has a free plan. Although it comes with a custom subdomain, it is enough for your particular project, as you will hardly need to promote it.
All you need is a live platform with minimum functionality and some of the baseline features. The entire building procedure will take not more than a couple of hours. You will only need to:
Step 1. Sign In
Getting started is always the easiest part when it comes to SaaS website builders. Wix is not an exception. To sign in, enter your password and email or use social accounts for instant registration. The system will automatically take you to the template collection.
Step 2. Pick a Template
The system offers over 550 layouts for different purposes. It has a separate education and culture category where you may select a responsive theme for your future website. Depending on the requirements and website purposes, you may choose:
- Private elementary school templates;
- Layouts for graduate parties;
- Ready-made university landing pages;
- Templates for music schools;
- School and classes website prototypes and more.
All templates are mobile responsive. They come with preset structures featuring all necessary on-page blocks you may need. Opt for the one that meets your goals the most.
Step 3. Add Content
Another easy stage where you only have to copy and paste the relevant content into on-page sections. If you already have a classroom Facebook community, things are even better. Wix ADI is an AI-based tool that is able to generate the content from your social account and deliver a ready-to-use website already filled with texts and images.
Users do not even need to move a muscle. A simple drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to upload photos, videos, and images. You may post photos from the latest educational events, conferences or learning trips.
Step 4. Do a Bit of Customization
At this stage, you may customize and modify your site to make it more engaging. Wix offers a range of widgets and add-ons that you can retrieve from the system’s marketplace right in your dashboard. For teacher’s needs, they may include:
- Wix Forum App – create a growing classroom community where students, parents, and teachers may discuss various topics, leave comments, start new threads, etc. A great way to interact with all the participants of the educational process and generate feedback.
- Login Functionality – provide access only to students and their parents. Select a Member Login Button from the list of tools and create a private learning community.
- Add a Blog – Wix boasts a wonderful blogging feature with a content management system and other settings. It may be used to share some interesting articles, guides, educational works, handy info for parents (for example, how to keep children focused), and more.
- Integrate Calendar – keep classmates enraged with the event calendar. Showcase test dates, program schedules, out-of-class activities, etc.
Step 5. Publish the Website
If the site is ready to go, preview it in your dashboard using mobile and desktop preview modes. Check how it looks like and publish the project. If you opt for a free plan, there is no need to connect a domain name, as you will get a custom one on default. So, this is it. Your classroom website has gone live.
Features a Teacher Website Should Have
While Wix offers ready-made layouts and comes with its Wix ADI functionality. A few things are left for the user. The system does everything for you. However, you still need to make sure your website has a set of fundamental features:
- Homepage – introduction or welcoming page to greet our students and their parents;
- Forum – a place for participants to interact, communicate, and discuss different aspects of the learning process;
- Event calendar – the feature is to highlight all major events, quizzes, tests, collaborations, and other things to come;
- Membership Access – as we are not dealing with a public project, make sure your website has a membership access feature;
- Blog – an optional feature to share some interesting articles as well as published works that may come in handy;
- About Me section – use the block to introduce some information about yourself. Parents will be pleased to know who their kids’ teacher is.
Now, you have everything you need to create a solid classroom website for free.
Despite the fact classroom websites are not very demanding in terms of resources and features, it still has a set of baseline functionality to implement. Despite the variety of specialized software to create classroom websites, Wix is still a better option.
First of all, it is free to use. Secondly, it is extremely simple and does not require coding skills. The last but not least, Wix offers free responsive Education and Culture templates with built-in site structure and tons of widgets to choose from the Marketplace. You get an all-in-one solution to build an engaging and functional web platform to improve the educational process.