I’ve been having the kids in my Applying Information and Communication Technology 2 15 F class (gotta love the short, snappy course name!) build websites as one of the their projects.
They’ve been using Weebly for the exercise. Weebly is a really amazing site that allows you to create your own website using one of their subdomains (something.weebly.com) or lets you attach your own domain name (for free on their part) if you know how to do the technical stuff.
There’s a lot of cool templates and lots of easy things you can pull into you site like YouTube videos and a long series of pictures.
The only thing you give away is a single line at the bottom of every page that says “Create a free website with Weebly.” That’s hardly a high price to pay for something like this.
While the projects, as they get done, are fairly amazing, we are having some frustrations with Weebly. It’s sometimes, and inconsistently, difficult to edit text, or delete parts you’ve added to a page. The inconsistency suggests that the bugs aren’t completely ironed out on Weebly’s end. Adding YouTube videos is a bit cumbersome and hardly intuitive.
I imagine these things will all be ironed out as Weebly grows, and so I’d readily recommend Weebly for classroom activities or personal use.