When I came to my current school 5 years ago I needed to build a website for a class project in my EdD program. I mentioned to my students I had to do this and 3 of my boys said, “Oh we have a website for Miami sports teams, we can show you!” And from there my love of weebly has grown~
Weebly is a cool, free, easy website builder that is user friendly and easy to learn. I have my professional presentations on my weebly www.nancypenchev.com. I also placed our Poetry Field Day materials on a weebly website to make it easy for teachers to access materials (www.poetryfieldday.weebly.com). You will notice a difference in the URLs for the webistes. My professional site doesn’t have a weebly domain. I paid for this extra, free site contain the weebly.com domain.
So what can you do with weebly in the classroom? As we have heard many times, when student write for you, they make it good enough. When students publish to the world, they make it shine. So have kids publish work online! Have them develop an e-portfolio where their best work is stored. Make a blog page where they record thoughts and learnings in Science. Create a website for their favorite author or sports person. Make a timeline of historical events for the era in history they are studying. Make a state website where they post places in their state to visit, historical facts, fun information, and contact info for the public. Really the possibilities are endless.
But what about internet safety? This is the perfect time to talk about personal information, what is shareable and what is private. With my students we do no publish websites until we are finished with the unit of study and parents give permission. At that point it is no longer a class project and parents accept responsibility.
How to Weebly.com
Go to www.weebly.com
Create your free account. Weebly has a video of how to that loads with the option to watch it now or later.
From now on when you visit weebly, you will LOG IN, not sign up. Click log in on the top right side.
You will need to categorize your site, give it a name, and set up your domain name. The URL/domain name can be changed later.
You will also select your theme for the pages (can be changed later.)
Click Edit beside My Site to open your webpage.
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Now is the fun part…adding your content.
On the side, click and drag the tools to the work page to build your pages. You can add titles, text, pictures, links, maps, and more!
To add a page, click the pages button at the top. Then, click ADD +. Choose the type of page and then it will add that page for you. In the free version you can only have 5 pages. I suggest deleting the about and contact page and use those for content, as well.
When you are ready, click the publish button at the top of the page. This will make you website available on the internet.
This is an assignment page I gave students to practice building pages.
Adding pages
Use the internet browser of your choice to go to www.weebly.com
Click log in. Put in your username/email and password
At the top, click pages
Add a page- Standard page
Page name- My school stuff 5th grade, Click Save and Edit
Click My School Stuff on the top bar
Click T for Title and drag it to the page. Make the title “My Fifth Grade Year”
Click Text and drag it over to the page. Type “On this page you will find my projects for this year.”
As the year goes, post your documents , powerpoints, and other school projects here.
At the top, click pages
Add a page- Standard page
Page name- My favorite things, Click Save and Edit
Click My Favorite Things at the top of the page
Touch Text and drag it over
Type in your favorite things
- Food
- Book
- Clothing
- Color
- Singer
- Sport
- Team
- Drink
- Website
- Other stuff
To exit- touch the three lines, exit editor, log out. Show Mrs. P the log out screen to leave