Now, with the advent of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of freely available tools on the Internet there are many options that make creating a web site fast and easy. The creator of the site simply logs in and, using tools much like those found in word processing software, creates the site and posts it to the Internet by clicking “Publish.” The three online tools for web site creation that I want to highlight here are Protopage, Pageflakes and Weebly.

Protopage
I was first exposed to Protopage at a “Let’s Talk Technology” meeting. Jim Wenzloff was our presenter and as a sidebar showed us his Protopage site. We all immediately wanted to know how the site was created and Jim was gracious enough to stray from his original topic and show us how to get started. Basically, you get a page before you even register. You add and manipulate a variety of widgets and tabs to personalize your site. If you like what you create, you can then register and you’ll be able to save and share your site. Several of the “Let’s Talk” members have gone on to use Protopage as the means to share resources with other educators. (Be sure to use the tabs near the top of the page when you are exploring these sites.) Jane Perzyk created this Protopage site for a presentation at the 2008 Educational Technology Coordinators Conference (ETCC) on “Juicing up the Online Learning Experience with Twitter, Protopage and other Web 2.O Tools.” Carol Isakson uses this Protopage site to hold the resources from a variety of workshops she has facilitated for Wayne RESA and the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning (MACUL.) Chris Skoglund and Rose McKenzie use this Protopage site to support the work of the MACUL special interest group for Special Education. Their site links to even more examples of Protopage sites created by educators.

Pageflakes
I don’t recall how I first learned about Pageflakes, but it is another web site creation tool that is worth exploring. Pageflakes and Protopage are very similar, but on Pageflakes the “widgets” stay in nice orderly rows. Pageflakes has the same “tab format” for accessing other pages within a site. In Pageflakes, your site and pages are private to you until you create a “Pagecast” which then gives the public access to your work. I created a Pageflakes site to collect and share resources with classroom teachers. You can check out my site here. Frank Miracola made this Pageflakes site to share resources from workshops he facilitates.

Weebly
The last site I’m going to talk about is Weebly. I learned about this one from the aforementioned Frank Miracola. At a meeting for the REMC Instructional Technology Specialists group, Frank showed us the website “Begin With Me,” which was created with Weebly. We were all very impressed with the look and feel of the site! Frank gave us a quick overview of how Weebly works and we were even more impressed. With Weebly you create a more traditional looking website. The tools are set up in a tabbed format and many of them are drag & drop or one click away from becoming a part of your site. Your site remains private until you choose to publish it. A nice feature of Weebly is that you can download the site to keep a backup copy and/or host it on your own server. Frank shared with us how quickly and easily he has been able to get other educators and even students up and running with their websites. Teaching with Technology and Curriculum and Instructional Technology are two more examples of sites created with Weebly:

With these tools and the many others that are out there, it’s now convenient, fun and easy to create and update your own web site. Let us know which tool you are using for your site and why you like it. Please share a link to your site too!

Posted by: Laura Cummings, SIGTELE Director

Jim started the session with a brief presentation about some of his beliefs for teaching and learning. These include:
* Knowledge is more important than facts.
* Engaged/motivated students learn more.
* How to learn is more important that what you learn each day.
* Test Scores will improve if students are actively involved in learning.
* Students will do better work for an authentic audience.
Jim’s presentation made an excellent lead-in to the hands-on portion of the workshop! Below are highlights of what we learned.

Official Scribe for Class
To engage and motivate us while providing us with an authentic audience, Jim had the participants take turns being the scribe for the session in a shared Google document. He suggested that having students take turns creating the notes that will be posted to the class website is a powerful motivator. Click on the link to check out what students in an AP Calculus class are posting when they have their turn to be class scribe. A text document is not the only way to share important learnings. Jim also pointed us to Slideshare, blogs and wikis as places to post shared notes.

Design Team for Creating Online Tutorials
To help students deepen their knowledge of the concepts and skills they are learning in class, Jim suggested having the students make tutorials about the concepts. He shared several examples with us. One example was made by two elementary students using screencasting where they explained how to round decimal numbers. Another example was a video of two students explaining the Partial Products method of multiplication from Everyday Math.

There are a variety of free tools that can help make this happen. Screen-O-Matic is a website that allows you to create a video recording of your screen and upload it for free hosting all from your browser with no install. The Jing Project is a free download that lets you capture screenshots as well as make videos of what is happening on your screen.

Curriculum Review Team
Jim suggested that students take turns making podcasts that summarize events and lessons taking place in their classrooms. Click on this link to hear this type of podcast as made by students from “Room 208.”

If you are working in a Mac environment, your students can create podcasts with Garage Band. If you are working in a Windows environment, Audacity is a free download that will provide the tools you need to record and save files as mp3s. Gcast is a website that lets you record your podcast via a toll-free call from any phone and then hosts the podcast on their site.

Daily Researchers
Students work to find the answers for each other. The teacher isn’t the provider of all knowledge. Someone can be appointed the “Search Expert” for the day. Depending on the tools available in your classroom(s), the expert could search on the Internet, contact an outside expert via Skype or email, or look at the resources available from the iTunes store. Students could collaborate and share the information via Google Docs or Google Notebook, a Moodle course, blog or a wiki.

To see and learn about even more of Jim’s suggestion for using technology to leverage instruction and learning, visit his wiki, A New Adventure. All of the participants in his workshop are already taking steps into that “new adventure.” We will be looking for you to join us on the journey!

Laura Cummings, MACUL SIGTELE Director