Sixth Grade Science Teacher Designs Her Own Website

About six or seven years ago, Stefanie Deringer found that her school's textbooks didn't have enough information.

"The textbooks just weren't meeting my needs," she said. "And I was using links to other people's websites but then the websites would be gone after a year. So I decided to make my own."

Deringer said she had taken 18 credits of computer science classes, and knew some HTML code, so she felt she could do it. She purchased Adobe Dreamweaver.

"And I just started playing around with it," she said.

Her website, mresdlovescience.com, covers all the sixth grade science topics, including life science, earth science and physical science. 

"The parents love using it as a resource," she said. 

Her website is hosted by Yahoo and there are daily statistics about it that she can see (how many viewers, what they are viewing, etc.), but she said she never paid much attention to it. 

Until recently, when the school had a contest to see whose website got the most visitors.

"And I saw I was getting 10,000 a month," Deringer said. "And I was getting emails from around the world, thanking me for the website and asking if they could link to it. I got an email from a science teacher at an English language school in the Republic of Moldova. I had to ask one of the social studies teachers where that even was."

(In case you are as curious as I was, I'll save you the research: The Republic of Moldova is in central Europe in the northeastern Balkans.) 

The power of the web is an amazing thing.