Web 2.0 and Emerging Learning Technologies/Weebly
Weebly is a website creator that allows you to create sites and blogs very quickly. It is completely free to create and publish a website and users can add videos, pictures, maps, and text by simply dragging them to their website.
You are also able to customize the temple (which is a pre-developed page design in electronic or paper media used to make new pages with a similar pattern or style) of your site, or build your own with HTML (it is a kind of language used for web pages to describe the structure and content in the form of a text; it stands for Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS - Cascading Style Sheets (it is a simple mechanism that describes how a document is going to be seen in the screen or how it is going to be printed. It offers total control of format and style of the document).
You can also create a blog and post your thoughts, experiences, feelings and receive comments using the slick blogging features. Weebly sites can be promoted by their users by sending emails to their contacts and posting to Facebook. It can support an unlimited number of blogs within the website with full comment moderation features allowing an open, moderated, or closed conversation.
You are able to publish a site with you own domain name (ie. www.teaching.com as an example, instead of www.teaching.weebly.com). Although you publish the page with this name, the website will still host for free. There is an option to purchase a domain directly within Weebly, or you can make some corrections and changes on a domain that you already own. There are some fascinating gadgets available for Weebly, such as Feed Reader, Adbrite Ads, Google Maps that you can add onto your webpage.
Here is a link in which you can learn more about the usage and facilities that Weebly can offer you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjY83SnrO1M
You can also visit our website to see how Weebly works and to visit some useful pages for TEFL: http://groupm-m8.weebly.com/
Teaching and learning possibilities
Through Weebly, you can find that a classroom website is a good way to stay organized. Here are some basic and very useful functions to take into account:
- Announcements: Teachers can make important announcements, from a birthday to an exam.
- Class Calendar: They can organize the class schedule and activities weekly or monthly.
- Homework Assignments: They can upload homework, extra practice or activities to do while the students are on holidays or some of them were absent.
- Supply Lists: Teachers have the possibility to add links of the material they use in the classroom or some extra one for the students to work on.
- Pictures: It is very important and useful to add pictures because we always need visual aids, environmental print when learning, especially a foreign language.
- Post Student Work: Teachers can post students’ work in the website so that students feel more confident and proud of their works.
- Parent Involvement/Volunteer Opportunities: It is a good way of keeping in touch with the parents or caretakers. They are also able to help the children with the homework as weel as to do some research, or why not, to learn as well.
- Links: Teachers can add links for different purposes: for fun (games, puzzles), for research (papers, articles) or for additional material.
Example Links
Here are some classroom websites built on Weebly
Mrs. Shields’ 3rd grade
http://ripplingpond.weebly.com/
This site gives 3rd graders tools to improve different areas of their learning. It includes lots of links and images related to teaching and learning. There´s a special link http://www.arcademicskillbuilders.com/games/viper/viper.html that English Teachers should use to teach grammar to their children.
Mr. Coley’s 5th grade
http://www.mrcoley.com/index.htm
This site gives 5th graders tools to cope with the corpus demands. Several links of different areas are included, such as Maths, Science, Social Studies, Art, etc. There is an interesting activity which says that each day, a student is assigned to be the Reporter. His or her job is to write a short article about what took place in class that day.
Ms. Roush’s Geometry
http://web.archive.org/20100411095217/fhsgeometry.weebly.com/index.html
The intention of this website is to allow students to access the wonderful world of mathematics in a variety of new and intriguing ways. Throughout this site they can easily find different pages for each of the classes and a blog where they will find questions for expansion of classwork and to get deeper understanding of what we are learning.
Mrs. Lyon – High School Health, Physical Education & Sports
http://mrs-coach-lyon.weebly.com/index.html
This site provides information for students, players, and parents of Health and PE classes and varsity softball squad. Students can learn more about the amazing technologies that they will be using in their jobs in the future.
Jan Harding’s page for teachers – Teaching with Technology
This site helps other teachers explore the wide variety of web applications available for easy classroom use to help teachers meet standards, motivate students, and save time.