Thanks for sharing this whole process.On occasion I had worried a little that we did not have teacher web pages but my focus has been on curriculum integration instead. But after reading your post I think at this point it might be a superfluous step. I like the individuality with which you have approached this because sometime I fall into the one size fit all trap.
In answer to your questions we use wikispaces for our junior high but we are still in early stages of integration with wikis. The same company that host our website and gradebooks hosts our moodle and our student projects. Because of our current infrastructure we did not want to host anything public directly on our server,

"My students are at their capable, end-of-year best as they work on final projects. My teachers have outdone themselves with great tech integration, and we are looking at a new, and hopefully more effective professional development model for next year."

I hope to mutter those exact words about my school someday.

Do you think that mandatory teacher websites are good idea? What are some of the requirements that teachers need to include on their pages?

Barbara and IMC Guy,
Thanks for your comments. I always hope other find these posts useful -- even better if they are inspiring.

Terra,
I can imagine situations where mandating teacher websites would be a good idea, but they are not a good idea to meet our needs.

In our middle and high school, all teachers are required to have a web presence via our school's Blackboard site. If school needed to close due to an emergency, such as SARS or H1N1, then classes could continue online to some extent. Some teachers use it extensively and others only use it for contacting students.

I really liked the idea that one benefit that is relevant right now is the H1N1 virus and how classes could continue on even if schools were to shut down. I know our school in the Spring was close to closing down because of the Swine Flu and how great would it have been to be able to continue lessons through a website I created? Thanks for your thought-provoking blog.

This was a very timely post for me, Susan. After some frustration last year with trying to get teachers to create individual class web pages, I decided to create web pages for everyone with basic information on them like curriculum and a few photos.

As a way for teachers to communicate with parents, I set up blogs using b2evolution which I was able to set up on the server. I'm working on getting teachers comfortable with using those now - I have 17 weeks to do this before I retire once again.

We are also working on having students use blogs for electronic portfolios. We're just getting this going now with a few classes, but I'm waiting for my replacement to show up so that I can get him/her comfortable with the whole system.

Thanks for the information about jalbum. I'm taking a look at that right now.

As always, the idea is to come up with the most time efficient way for teachers and students to use these tools.