Weebly Analysis from the Students' Point of View.

With all the summaries that I've posted last month in regards to the learning of my colleagues at the school I realized that I have not posted my own summary.  For the past 3 months I've had two groups of students  doing e-portfolios on Weebly.  The program is simple to use, lets you have 40 accounts for free, and for teachers to assess, instead of gathering up the individual web addresses of each student who creates a eportfolio web site, Weebly lets the teacher control the sites, make it private or not, and change the passwords.  See my blog entry on Weebly to understand the Pro's and Con's of the program.

At the end of the school year I asked my Grade 8 students a number of questions in regards to Weebly and doing electronic portfolios for their learning.  The following is the results of the 28 students that answered the survey.  

I was happy that students realized that reflecting on their learning through the eportfolios helped them learn more and helped them realize that they were learning.

The data below did surprise me.  I asked twice for parents to assess their child's learning with the electronic portfolios.  From these results it's clear that I need to do a better explanation to parents of the reason for electronic portfolios and what they can do for both the child and the parent in talking about the learning.

I was happy that students realized they were choosing the activities and what they added to their portfolios, giving them ownership of their learning and help them understanding their learning more.

The data below was no surprise.  I knew that by reflecting on their learning, they would learn more.  What I am hoping for this coming year is more peer assessment, opening up their electronic portfolios to their friends.

 After reading about developing curious and creative minds (John Barell - Developing More Curious Minds)

I can honestly say that I did not use the blogging section of the electronic portfolio to it's full capacity, I should target a day (Friday would be good) with a reflection question every single time, so students can get use to this and be prepared to come up with their own reflections.  Although I am happy with the results of the survey, I could of done more.

Finally, you can see from the data below that the students did not need to spend the entire class to do their portfolios, it ranged from 10 - 30 minutes, depending on what they were working on, and this was not every day, only 1 - 2 days a week.  This is manageable in regards to time for any teacher.

The final question was a question of preference that I had asked my class and it was completely different then the response I got from  my 1st term class.  The 2nd term loved Weebly more then Webnode, whereas the 1st term students like Webnode more then Weebly.  The only difference was which web designing site was introduced first to the students.  Students liked the 1st web site introduced to them best.  In the 2nd term I introduced Weebly to the students first, and here are the results.  Interesting to look into more.

I hoped these results helped you as much as they intriged me.

What to use with your Students for putting their learning online.

Many people are into Wiki, many are doing Blogger, some are into easy web designing programs like Webnode and Weebly.  So which do you do use with your students? It all depends on what reasons you want to start putting up your students work on the internet.  I have done Blogs with my students using Blogger, have helped teachers with their Wikis, used Facebook for e-portfolios for student work on Illustrator and Photoshop, and now I'm trying Weebly with my Grade 8 students for e-portfolios and ease of marking.  So which ones do I recommend?  I show a number of them to the teacher and let them decide.  It may take some time but in the end they can do their own comparisons and take responsibility for their own choices.

The following are some advantages and disadvantages of each program for you to consider before you make your own choice.  These are a few that I have come across or thought of.  I hope this helps you

Advantages	Disadvantages
Facebook
·      Great for using the photo albums ·      Students can “Poke” you when they add something to their photo albums. ·      The program gets the other person’s comments on your desktop when they have added something. ·      Great for peer assessment, students all become friends  and can comment on each others work. ·      Easy for the teacher to assess with comments, for instant feedback without giving a mark. ·      Can add videos if doing animation in your classroom. ·      Security is good, to keep others out. ·      Parents can become Friends so they can check out their own child’s work.	·      Additions are not sortable ·      Hard to search what was done. ·      When you have 30 or more students doing work and adding to their desktop, your desktop gets flooded. ·      Need to have a YouTube channel to add videos. ·      Cannot embed other Web 2.0 programs (ie Glogster, Prezi, etc)  in Facebook. ·      Need to watch student’s friends, sometimes they invite their friends and  they don’t watch their security, so their “desktop” gets crowded if garbage. ·      Students add games to their  account so they can play online during class time.  It also adds to the teacher’s desktop. ·      Students can hide through security what they are doing.
Webnode
·      Free ·      Easy to set up and use. ·      Can be individualized with your own pictures, colors, etc. ·      Many different Templates and different pages you can put into your Webnode. ·      Has stats you can see. ·      Has RSS feed ·      Has different types of pages you can choose including a Portfolio section. ·      Can embed any other program using the HTML code, like YouTube, Prezi, Glogster, etc. ·      Can have more then one web site on your account. ·      Can have as many pages as you want. ·      Many designs that are free. ·      Easy to use and self explanatory. ·      Can Tweet anything on the page. ·      Has many gadgets you can add to your web page, ie poll, codes, different videos from different web sites (educational sites). ·      Can have a list of student sites to your list.	·      To embed you need to know some HTML coding. ·      Does not feed in well with Blogger “Blog lists”. ·      Does not appear well if you use the RSS feed for a newspaper program like “paperli”. ·      Cannot lock it down.
Weebly
·      Free ·      Easy to set up and use. ·      Has RSS feed ·      Has a page for a blog. ·      You have 5 pages and as many photos as you want. ·      Easy to add in columns with picture on one side and a write-up on the other side. ·      Can embed any other program with easy, a copy and a paste. ·      Easy to embed a video ·      Instantaneous so there is no need to wait for a publisher to create a new edition or update information ·      Teacher creates the account for all students, giving them individual user names and passwords. ·      Teacher has access to all accounts, so it’s easy to assess as well ·      Can set it up so that you cannot see the site unless you have a password to get on the site.	·      When you embed other programs sometimes they affect the running of the program on the Internet.  An example is “Prezi” will freeze your Weebly home page. ·      Open to SPAM and Vandalism if not managed properly. There are easy ways to restore a page however, and on WikiEducator you must be logged in to edit pages so this reduces vandalism by automated spam bots. ·      Only get 40 accounts to set up.  So if you want more, you either pay or get a colleague to join and this gives you more accounts for students. ·      Limit of size of a photo.
Wikis
·      Free ·      Easy to set up and use. ·      Some wikis allow for a lot of formatting. ·      Can use this program to collaborate – giving control of different pages to different users. ·      Can be password protected. ·      Can check to see when the last update of the Wiki was. ·      Has RSS feed ·      Give permission to anyone that you want to have access to edit ·      Wikis are instantaneous so there is no need to wait for a publisher to create a new edition or update information ·      People located in different parts of the world can work on the same document ·      The wiki software keeps track of every edit made and it's a simple process to revert back to a previous version of an article.  All the drafts of a document are saved.  If a team of people have altered a document several times and feel that using the original introduction would now work better than the revised version, they can easily go back and retrieve the original. ·      Some of the Gadgets you can add to your Wiki are very interactive, and easy to do. ·      Has Stats.	·      Does not feed in well with Blogger “Blog lists”. ·      Does not appear well if you use the RSS feed for a newspaper program like “paperli”. ·      Not to crazy about the look of the Wiki. ·      Need to know some HTML coding if you wish to embed some programs. ·      Wikis do make it easy for several people to brainstorm and collaborate on projects by adding content to a group website, but if no one is keeping tabs on the content, it can get pretty confusing.  ·      Although this program is user-friendly, it doesn’t look like it.
Blogger
·      Free ·      Easy to set up – step by step, easy to use. ·      Can be individualized. ·      Create your own design. ·      Can save drafts of post and work on it later. ·      Has a number of apps you can use with an IPads. ·      The App lets you take pictures with your IPad and then put it up on your Blog ·      Teacher can have a “Blog list” of students blogs and this makes it easier to mark. ·      Instantaneous so there is no need to wait for a publisher to create a new edition or update information ·      The “Blog list” can be set up so that when students add something to their blog the blog address goes up to the top of the list, and you can see the date of when it was added. ·      Can embed anything in your Blog. ·      They can add their own blog list ·      Easy to embed a poll, a video from your YouTube account. ·      Once you set up Blogger, you have a gmail account and a GoogleDoc account as well.  Easy to embed all together. ·      Parents can follow their own child’s work, see what is happening in the class. ·      Easy to make a homework list or embed a Twitter school account for tweeting homework. ·      You can add pages to your blog for different subject areas.	·      There is a limited number of setups for the template but you can change the look of it.  Does take some time to set the template.  You may lose the kids in the initial setup so give yourself and the students time to play with the look of it. ·

The Wonders of Weebly

My students have been learning a number of Web 2.0 tools, photo modification, sideshows, the need for Avatars, etc.  Because of all of these different programs on different sites, we needed an area where all can be put, and that way, seeing the growth of their learning would help build confidence in students, would help them self-assess, and would help students in comparison, and analysis of different tools with the same purpose.  It is the hope that the students will be able to synthesis all these tools and come up with an analysis of which Web 2.0 tool is the best for what situation.  The  evaluation in this area is to make judgements of each tool with their own defined criteria of needs, for a specific project that is called for in any course or subject, not just my  course.

Weebly is a simple, free Web design and hosting system that takes nearly all the pain out of creating a site.  You use drag and drop features to create the pages.  As a teacher you can set up a class of 40 students, setting the user names and passwords of the students one by one, or by uploading a text file of students names, etc.  The program lets you print out all passwords and as the teacher you can lock up the web sites so no one can see the student sites unless they have a password that you set up.  This is for the security and safety of the students.  


Another excellent feature of this tool is their blog area, which you can use for critical thinking activities and also for peer assessment as there is a comment section for his area.  

Weebly has big gaps in its feature set (when dragging and dropping, sometimes the machine lags in this area and sometimes the embedding feature jams up the visual look of the site but by closing off the site and then opening it, all rights itself.  As a quick-and-dirty site host, it's not bad. I really like its simplicity. You can start by selecting a page layout from Weebly's templates (all of which look good - see above picture), or just start typing on the default template. Adding elements like pictures (via uploads or Flickr), YouTube videos, and Google maps to a page is very simple, just drag and drop the feature.  Adding pages to your site is also easy, a click of a button.   But there are some limitations in this service. You can't put a picture into a block of text after the fact--there are separate module types for text and for text-plus-image. You can't put a headline or a caption on an embedded object (like a Google map or YouTube video);  And I'm not sure about space (how many pages you are allowed).  

At present it suites our needs for our eportfolio.  We'll continue to explore this aspect, and I'll continue to assess Weebly in this blog.

Below is a YouTube video on Weebly.

Here are more Web 2.0 tools that my students will be exploring this year in Grade 9/10.  As you can see below, Google covers many of the aspects of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy with their aspects.

http://blog.kathyschrock.net/2011/03/google-tools-and-blooms-revised.html

Finally, just to see how you too can integrate some Web 2.0 tools into daily practise see the Prezi below.

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy and Web 2 Tools on Prezi