Getting Weebly Working for You!
Weebly.com is a website where you can build websites for free, or of course, you can pay if you like. There is Weebly.com, which is the basic site that will allow anyone to create a website. More useful to teachers, is the education.weebly.com site. This site is especially designed to meet the needs of students and teachers. Teachers can add students into a class and then make settings for all the students' websites. For example, the teacher can choose to make all the students' websites private or public. They can also control login names and passwords, which comes in handy if you teach younger students who have the propensity to forget their passwords.
The Weebly site itself is really easy to use. I have used it with students for two years in a row now, and each time I give my students only bare bones instructions on how to use the program and they do great in figuring it out on their own. My students have really enjoyed using Weebly because of its design ease, as well as the motivation of having their work displayed on the world wide web. The one main draw back to the free version of the site is that you may only publish five pages on one website. The website does not limit you in making more pages than five, but to have more than five published, you have to pay for the upgrade. It's important to warn your students about this before hand, so they can design their pages accordingly.
Here are a few websites that my grade six students created using Weebly:
If you are thinking that you might want to try Weebly, or another online website making program, here are a few ideas that might get you motivated. In the classroom you might try:
- creating a classroom website to communicate to parents and students (check out this website if you are interested in seeing some examples: http://web1.nbed.nb.ca/sites/district6/qms/Pages/TeacherWebsites.aspx )
- using a wiki website to collaboratively create a website with a group of students or the whole class
- creating a website to showcase your students' work
- having students create their own websites to demonstrate their learning
- building a website as a challenge or extension project for students who need an extra challenge
- creating a online school newspaper
Enjoy the journey!
Every time I come to your blog posts, I get floored. Impressive. You have several things I would like to be able to "come back to" when/if I have the time. I still got to start all my projects for this class yet so I hope these will be available after the course is over.
ReplyDeleteThanks Shane! I am also enjoying reading yours!
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