Secondary English Teachers’ Perspectives on the Design and Use of Classroom Websites.

Although K-12 teachers are frequently exhorted to maintain classroom websites, little is known about how they view or accomplish such work. To address this gap in the research literature, the study described here used qualitative methods, including computer-mediated interviews and document analysis, to explore secondary English teachers’ perspectives on how they designed and used classroom websites to support their pedagogy. Participants included 20 teachers with varying professional experience from five different school districts in the northeast United States. Data analysis was framed by sociocultural perspectives on literacy and technology. Participants reported five main reasons for creating their websites: (a) conform with school or district expectations, (b) communicate with parents, (c) help students catch up on in-class information and assignments, (d) position students for postsecondary success, and (e) respond to external pressure. Their uses for their websites ranged from providing online versions of existing inclass resources and materials to providing additional opportunities for interaction beyond class. Their efforts were supported and influenced by district administrators and by peers. On Sunday night, Katie scans her classroom website on her laptop before shifting to updating her Facebook status, texting a friend, and checking her Google email account on her iPhone. She has taught middle school in a suburban district for 3 years, and her habit is to update homework assignments for her students on the class site once a week. She uses her smartphone constantly for various purposes, but she satisfies her principal’s demand for a classroom webpage with minimal commitment. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 12(2) 123 In a neighboring district, Tommy reviews his Advanced Placement English class’s Blackboard site. He has posted a second poem by an author whom the students previously discussed in class, and he wants to review students’ comments about it on the blog page. The conversations students started face to face in school on Friday continue online into the night as Tommy debates sleeping or continuing to follow the discourse. Representing a third district, Brian sits at his dining room table and pencils an Ain his grade book anticipating Monday’s scheduled parent-teacher conference for a child in his eighth-grade English class. He is confident in his ability to assess students but uneasy when parents inquire about his lack of a classroom website. He feels the pressure of his colleagues’ connectivity to the web, but he has yet to join them. Instead, he is focusing on class presentations using his new ceiling-mounted projector and SmartBoard, as well as the two dozen laptops his department recently acquired. These secondary English teachers from upstate New York think about classroom websites differently. All three received district-sponsored professional development on creating websites, but the results of those trainings vary, both in terms of the online presence they have (or have not) developed and the ways they use (or do not use) those sites pedagogically. These teachers are not alone in their need to consider the role of classroom websites in their instruction. Such websites have become ubiquitous in K-12 schools in the United States, with teachers referring to them in syllabi, at parent conferences, and at curriculum nights and open houses. Teachers are exhorted to construct and use such pages by administrators, professional developers, and the authors of educational books and articles (Bodner, 2004; Dunn, 2011; Marowitz, 2006). In recent years, teachers with exemplary webpages have been honored with awards such as the International Reading Association’s Miss Rumphius designation (Karchmer, Mallette, Kara-Soteriou, & Leu, 2005). Little is known, however, about teachers’ perspectives on their development and use of classroom websites, particularly for English language arts instruction. To date, we have little empirical data on questions such as what causes English teachers to initiate or abandon a classroom website, how their sites change over time, and what costs and benefits they identify for this work. To explore some of these issues, we (a middle school English teacher and a literacy teacher educator) undertook research framed by two questions:  What do secondary English teachers say about why and how they created their classroom websites?  What do these teachers say about how they incorporate their websites (or don’t) into their English language arts instruction? In the pages that follow, we review literature related to our study, describe our methods, and share findings from analysis of participants’ websites as well as what they said and demonstrated about those sites in computer-mediated interviews. Finally, we discuss the study’s limitations and its implications for research and practice in teacher education. Review of Related Literature As the Internet becomes more influential in aspects of contemporary society, including workplaces, communities, and civic life, teachers are increasingly expected or required to have classroom websites (Dunn, 2011). For example, in an attempt to help students and parents make informed decisions about higher education, the Texas state legislature Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 12(2) 124 unanimously enacted a “first of its kind” transparency law in 2008 requiring all public colleges and universities to post course syllabi, professors’ curriculum vitae, previous course evaluations, and attendance costs online (Carter, 2011). Although few K-12 districts have such formal requirements, they have similar needs to disseminate information to multiple constituencies, as well as demonstrate to business leaders and other community members that they are preparing youth for 21st-century employment demands. Students who use technology seamlessly outside of school—the population that Moorman and Horton (2007) call “screenagers”—often expect to be able to manage their school lives online as well, from accessing lunch menus and team schedules to emailing teachers about homework and interacting with peers around projects. As the percentage of youth using the Internet increases (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010), the pressure on teachers to create websites also increases. Most of the literature on classroom websites, however, tends to be practical or theoretical in orientation. Marowitz’s (2006) article entitled “Why Your Music Program Needs a Web Site (and a Few Ideas to Get Started)” is typical: It describes two main purposes for a website (communicating with constituents and building the program’s image), recommends features a site might include, and offers tips about managing the process. It does not, however, describe existing websites nor does it provide evidence that such sites enhance student learning. Other scholarship theorizes that classroom websites enhance communication between teachers and parents, motivate students to edit their writing, and promote students’ acquisition of 21st-century skills (Bodner, 2004; Karchmer, 2007; Unal, 2008), although these claims have yet to be rigorously tested. Only a few studies have described the features of classroom websites (Dunn & Peet, 2010; Holcomb, Castek, & Johnson, 2007; Tingen, Philbeck, & Holcomb, 2011). The earliest and most extensive of these was Holcomb et al.’s (2007) content analysis of 280 K-12 exemplary classroom websites from an initial pool of approximately 2,000 sites representing various disciplines and grade levels. They found that eight elements (course overview, calendar, teacher information, title, email links, link to school site, date uploaded, and visitor counter) were most common. Other key findings included differences in interactivity by grade level (elementary teachers were more likely to promote ongoing projects and publish student work than secondary) and high rates of site abandonment (38% of teachers left their site inactive after 3 years). Researchers concluded that regularly maintained websites could extend learning beyond the classroom, although they did not measure learning directly nor interview teachers. More recently, Dunn and Peet (2010) reviewed existing teacher websites to propose a five-level taxonomy of classroom websites, ranging from static (disseminating information that does not change) to pedagogical memory (serving as a dynamic repository for a course). Summarizing this research for practitioners, Dunn (2011) advised teachers to match their level of website with honest assessment of their skills, time, and resources. Although he acknowledged that websites in each category had value, he argued that the more interactive levels (4 and 5) offered more opportunities to “extend learning past the school day” and “support lifelong learning” (p. 62). Although such classification of existing websites is useful, it has its limitations, particularly for researchers concerned with sociocultural dimensions of literacy teaching and learning (Author, 2010; Gee, 2000). Take, for example, Tingen et al.’s (2011) finding, based on 5 years of archived data for 10 exemplary classroom websites, that most “functioned primarily to distribute static information” (p. 89), because the material posted on the sites changed little over time. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 12(2) 125 Considering that pattern with a lens emphasizing the social practices surrounding those websites may yield different understandings than content analysis alone. If English teachers frequently update external links to grammar guides on their websites, it may indicate that they value and encourage use of those resources. If students are not expected or do not choose to use those resources consistently—if they are not embedded in how literacy teaching and learning are constructed in a particular classroom—then the website may change withou