Creating Class Pages in Google Sites

I believe it is extremely important for our teachers to have a presence on the web to facilitate communication with parents and students alike. Here, at my school, only a handful of teachers have web pages and keep their pages and update their pages on a regular basis. I’ve been looking for a nice, clean, and simple interface to make this task less arduous for them. Google recently announced the launch of a new Google App called Google Sites. We have been using Yourclasspage.com for the last few years but I wanted something for the teachers that did not look so “geocities in the 1990′s.” You can see what I mean by clicking here.

A few days ago, I decided to check Google Sites out and I have to say, I really liked it and I think it will be the solution I was looking for. One of the things that I need to be conscious of, as with anything I propose to the teachers, is that it is flat out simple to use. That was one of the few benefits of Yourclasspages.com. It was very easy to add and remove content. The problem with this site was that all of the content was on a single page that would go on forever. Your entire site was contained on one page…not very user friendly. Google Sites offers much more, in terms of functionality, than the product we are currently using. I was able to create a new site with information about 2 separate classes in about 30 minutes.

I really liked the many choices I had available to me in Google Sites. I was able to add many different types of pages, including a file cabinet (for storing files), a list, announcements, and a dashboard page which lets me add any one of a couple hundred Google Gadgets to my site. I was also able to embed my Google Calendar and any of my Google Docs directly into any of the pages in my newly created Google Site. The only thing I found to be a liitle clunky was the navigation sidebar. Anytime I added a new page, I had to go into the Sidebar editor, then into the Navigation editor to add the new page to my Navigation bar. Another great feature that I think the teachers will buy into is the fact that they can assign, to a student aid, the ability to collaborate on the page and make edits to the Site for the teachers. This is all done by simply adding that student as a collaborator on the site. Currently, the teacher would have to give their aid their password in order to make edits, and since we all know, most people use the same password for EVERYTHING, this was not a feasible option. This will help to alleviate the “time issue” I hear about so often.

Overall, I was very pleased with my experience on Google Sites. I’m going to be rolling it out school wide over the next month or so, so I’ll keep everyone updated on how it goes.

EXAMPLES:

A yourclasspage.com example for one of my teachers

The same site in Google Sites

See the difference? Yeah…me too.

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