(My apologies to anyone who uses the Basecamp and Highrise forums, this post is there also)

I’ve been hanging out mostly in the Highrise forums so please forgive me if this topic has been covered before, I could not find very much of it on the search.

Are there teachers that are using Backpack as an easy classroom website? Is there any reason you couldn’t do that?

I work in educational technology and I just started writing a technology blog (like the world needs another one – NOT) at the insistence of the Overlords at my day gig.

I’m trying to answer some specific questions from teachers.

I got a question yesterday about how a teacher can make a really, REALLY easy website (they don’t have a lot of time and some of them are not super technical) for their classroom. They want it to be either really cheap or free. (I would assume they would be OK with ad supported because nothing is really free, everyone needs some kind of revenue stream) I would like to make them a list of less than 10 that I would feel confident about.

I’m personally a huge fan of Squarespace (http://www.squarespace.com) but I think that might be a little much for them.

So my question is: What are your ideas? I can talk about Google Sites. But I know that there are lots of other things out there. I’m thinking that Backpack might make an interesting classroom website. No reason it can’t right?

What do you guys think?

Thanks,

Cindy
http://www.extrageek.com

Hi Cindy
I use Backpack for course planning / management, but not for course websites. The main reasons for that is that I have a html/css template that I’m happy with, server space, sufficient tech. skills, & I don’t feel like upgrading my BP account to get the extra pages I need. I also really prefer human-readable URLs to the strings of #s BP uses for pages.

Having worked in support for profs. using Blackboard while I was in grad. school, I would say that 98% of what people actually DO in Blackboard (distributing readings and handouts, posting announcements & related links) could be done in Backpack or many other much simpler, cheaper tools (don’t get me started about the nightmare that is WebCT….).

Two other thoughts. I would never consider an ad-supported site for a course. And I would prefer a list of 3-4 carefully chosen possibilities to a list of ten.
—Derick

Derick -

Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply. I will take that to heart as I’m compiling my article.

You are right about the ‘10’ – I just found so many, that was the narrowed down number! But I think 3-5 would be better. If I’m confident that I can give the right information.

Most of the teachers that ask me about this stuff are not super tech savvy so I have to be careful about what I suggest. But maybe that’s a better way to approach it – starting with the very, very simple and also list just a few of the bigger tools for the more adventurous.

Thanks again,

Cindy

Cindy,

A few thoughts. I’m not a teacher, but have been using Backpack for several years to ‘organize my life’. I use for personal, community , and work projects – some in collaboration with others, some not.

I’m quite ‘tech savvy’ and often run in to the situation where I assume too much about others willingness to use the wiki features inherent in Backpack. On the other hand I’ve had pretty good luck with inviting a lot of folks to share pages I set up (no cost to them – cost tied to the page creator) and having only a small subset actually edit the pages collaboratively with me. That’s OK cause the rest still read the pages.

Constraint with this approach is everyone you share a agpe with has to give you their e-mail address and they have to register with BP. An alternative that might work for you is to make the page ‘public’. This still allows a few of you to edit the page, but anyone in the world can read it.

Good luck – Bill in Virginia

Thanks Bill, good thoughts!

Not sure if you’re aware, but another advantage of BP is that 37signals gives discounts for teachers (or at least did). I’m not sure if that is still their practice with the new pricing model, but I remember them offering a great discount in support of the efforts of teachers. Good luck, and I think BP would be a great option since it usually has a small learning curve for anyone new.

I use it to post assignments, it is a little too basic for web pages but I embed the backpack pages in Blackboard, that way I can easily email homework assignments.

I have each student in my class sign up for a free backpack account. I can then set up and share pages with them for several different in class projects. They each have one page for their weekly journals, they create project pages to collect and organize information for podcasts, and they can do simple research reports, complete with photos, video, etc. I also grade their work right on backpack. After they create a project or page, or after a week of journaling, I add a note to their page with a rubric and comments.

I am a high school band director, but I use this for mt Music Business and Technology class. I also use it with my private trumpet students – they each have a page that we post their weekly practice assignments on, and then they can go home and add their own practice journal for the week. We’ll also record at our lessons and throw up mp3’s for study at home, or just to let Mom and Dad hear johnny play!

I’ve started using BP with students working on term papers. Their topics, bibliographies, my notes on our meetings, and any e-mails we exchange re: the papers go into a section of the page (I may split it up into separate pages if it gets unwieldy but so far it’s working on a single page). This should be really helpful in keeping track of whether they’ve taken into account the recommendations I’ve made re: their papers and/or justified not taking my suggestions into account.

At this point the page is private, although I could see how it could also be used (with individual pages) as a shared page to create a log / store which each student could review the history.

I’m jumping in on this because I noticed that someone mentioned Web CT. This program was used throughout grad school and it was my single worst nightmare. Steer clear of this one!

I’m an adjunct teacher at 3 colleges, so I decided to get Backpack for course planning, but I still use each school’s course management stuff (BlackBoard for one, proprietary for others) and lots of paper. But I always have variant versions of assignment sheets, and I’m hoping this will help me keep track (sometimes I need differences for Summer session or for the section with a lab). I plan on making pages for each “week” and each major assignment.

I do wish the todo lists could be nested, however.

I’ve been using Backpack to manage our department course listings and web content… We use an outside vendor for the website itself but I keep all the info together in Writeboards. It’s worked out quite well. I could see having a Backpack page for the class (group page for assignments, etc) and even one for each student (grades, assignment critiques, etc), though if you were talking parents of students I could see stubbornness to adopt too.