New - Weebly for Education!

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Permalink Reply by Faith Shabat on September 30, 2009 at 7:01pm

Jonathan,
Your resources are outstanding. I just looked through your 2 websites. When I'm not so exhasuted, I plan to explore them more leisurely. Thank you so much for sharing with us!
Faith

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Wylie on September 30, 2009 at 7:19pm

Thanks for your kind words Faith.

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Permalink Reply by Dan Veltri on October 14, 2009 at 3:16pm

Hi Everyone,

My name is Dan Veltri and I am a founder of Weebly. Thank you Jonathan for announcing Weebly for Education to the community here at Classroom 2.0! This past weekend I participated in the Classroom 2.0 web show "Using Weebly to Design Classroom Websites". It was a really great show that provided a full demo of Weebly and answered a ton of questions from the Classroom 2.0 community. A full video of the show is available to watch at http://vimeo.com/7061272

I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have!

Best,
Dan

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Permalink Reply by Lauriene Tschang on October 1, 2009 at 7:06pm

Thank you so much for sharing this. As every school's concern, security is on top of our priority. How do you protect your student's identity when they do the "blogger of the week". How about comments?

I've been leaning towards edublogs for blogging for teachers and students. However, decision still hasn't been made.

Your suggestion is truly appreciated.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Wylie on October 1, 2009 at 7:20pm

Hi Lauriene. For Blogger of the Week, I brief the kids on what they can and cannot write about. That is, personal details, student surnames, addresses, etc. are not allowed. Keeping the brief to doing a weekly summary of what we do in class helps that. However, I will might change the topic soon. Otherwise, I have parental permission from all but one of my parents to have student work published online using first name identifiers. I don't publish photos, email addresses, or any other personal details.

Comments are all subject to approval. My approval. When comments are made on the blog posts, they come to my email first. From there, I can decide whether to approve or deny the comment. The students only see the comments after I have approved them. Weebly allows free or moderated comments. Seeing as these are not individual blogs, just students posting under one page of the class website, they are easy for me to moderate.

Soon I hope to experiment with some 'closed door' student websites. Weebly for Education lets you have private student websites that are password protected. Only the students in my class will know the password, so they can access each others websites, while outsiders cannot. I will probably change the password on a regular basis to help security further.

I hope that helps, but feel free to ask anything else you are curious about.


Good luck with your decision!

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Wylie on October 2, 2009 at 4:43pm

If you try Weebly for Education, but are thinking "Wouldn't it be great if I could do x or y...", then they have created a feature suggestion page where you can add what you would like to see to future updates. Think of it as adding to Weebly's To Do List. This one is specific to the education websites. There is a different one for standard sites.

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Permalink Reply by Matt McGoldrick on October 2, 2009 at 4:50pm

I stumbled across Weebly on Classroom2.0 awhile back and started using it to post assignments as well as to create a discussion forum for my 5th grade students to discuss their thoughts about going to middle school. It was a hit! The kids really enjoyed using the forum to communicate outside of school and the parents fell in love with having the assignments available online. This year I was able to convince my team members to create sites as well; by the end of the week, 4th grade followed suit. Weebly is so easy to use and update; the wide variety of features just adds to its appeal.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Wylie on October 2, 2009 at 4:54pm

Have you signed up for the Educator's Account? It makes it easier to do things like post assignments, and has the ability to have closed door websites for students. All you need to do is login with your existing Weebly account at Weebly for Education and you will get an automatic upgrade to the new Education version.

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Permalink Reply by Matt McGoldrick on October 4, 2009 at 3:41pm

In did, in fact, register for a Weebly for Education account in order to allow my students to create web sites. Thanks for the suggestion.

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Permalink Reply by Abaca Sim on October 4, 2009 at 9:47pm

Cool.. sounds really cool.
I'll check your site right away..

Speaking of teachers.. I happen to remember that today (+8 in my timezone).. is Oct. 5 so it's teachers day today! oh yeah.. so sending out shout-outs to all the modern heroes! Happy Teacher's Day!

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