An Open Letter to Teachers With a Boss Website
If we’re being honest, I think your website is pretty amazing. You’ve done an excellent job over the last 17 years organizing, revamping and making sure it hums and sings a glorious song about your class and all the great learning that goes on there.
However, it’s probably holding you back.
I get it. I really do. You’ve built a masterpiece and you poured over every detail to arrive at a gratifying spot in cyberspace. You’re camping next to water and life is good.
So why would you want to leave all that behind and jump onto a new tool like Teams?
Well, the good news is you can easily do both.
Your website is a great resource, works really well and ABSOLUTELY SHOULD be an active part of your instruction.
And you should start using Teams.
Teams is great for supporting powerful collaboration between students and for distributing, collecting and giving feedback on student work. It’s great for a lot of other reasons too but what I want to talk about here is how to easily pull in your instructional oeuvre.
Read below to learn how to use the tab feature to pull your website into Teams and keep your masterwork front and center.
Insert a Website as a Tab
Open Teams and click into whichever Team you want to put your site (and make sure you are in the General channel.)
Then copy the URL of your website (or, since you probably also have your own domain can just type it in from memory.)
Find the + button next to Grades tab at the top. Click this.
Then choose the button that says Website (it’s pink with circle on it.)
You will then be prompted to paste (or type) in the URL.
Click save and your students will be united as one with your crown jewel.
While we’re talking about adding websites as tabs, they are a great way to draw student attention to any website resource you want them to and can be added to any channel so you can put them right at the point of instruction.
BITS AND PIECES 