Using Weebly to Showcase Work

My students completed awesome, authentic learning tasks digitally! Seriously, they're great! But where do I put them???

As technology becomes more prevalent, and schools continue to push toward one-to-one, this question has become one of the more frustrating for teachers. Students are expected to utilize apps and Web 2.0 tools to highlight and demonstrate their abilities in ways never before possible. They are creating videos and presentations to showcase their understanding of content indicators, which provide wonderful evidence for teachers that need to determine whether or not a student has mastered those indicators, and to what degree. However, digital age learners must also share their work, as well as collaborate with and/or critique the work of others. But what is the best platform to accomplish this goal? For the purpose of this post, I'm going to focus on the sharing aspect of this goal using Weebly. 

What is Weebly?

Weebly is a drag and drop website builder, as well as a web-hosting service that houses the websites that are created there. Check out more detail ---------> HERE!

What can you share?

Almost anything! Weebly allows you to share everything from simple text to images to videos (both linked and embedded), within a single page, or across multiple pages. Weebly also syncs nicely with Google Drive, so students can easily share Docs and Presentations from their Drive work with a few clicks. Below are snapshots of the various elements that can be added to a Weebly website. (It is important to note that all of the elements shown here are available to add using a computer. The Weebly app has 15 of the 29 options available, which are circled.)

How easy is it?

As easy as drag and drop, with a few clicks or copy and paste! Simply pick the element that you would like to add to the site, drag that element onto the page, and add the content you like within that element.

Why use it? 

When students create documents, screencasts, videos, or any other type of media, it is important for them to share their work with an authentic audience. With Weebly, students are actually creating a website that can be viewed by anyone that has the link. One might consider it a "one stop shop" for sharing digital projects. The simplicity of the tool (especially the app) makes it very student friendly. The benefit of this tool would be that it takes very little time to actually teach, and students can begin using it immediately. 

Potential Problems...

The trickiest part of using Weebly to share student work is that the work itself will need to be converted into a format that can be shared on the website. For example, students that create a project using Book Creator, iMovie, or a screen-casting tool like Doceri will need to convert the project itself into a YouTube video in order to share it on Weebly. Fortunately, most apps offer quick conversions that can be completed with a few taps.