Google+Sites

Google sites is an easy and relatively user friendly way to create a website either for your personal use or for your classroom. Below is a document that walks you through the process step by step. Before you embark on your google sites website creation extravaganza, you will need a couple of things:

1) A google account (they are free) 2) Content to put on the webpage (pretty nothing is still nothing) 3) A plan for organizing that content

Creating a Google Account
If you don't have a google account, you'll need to make one before you can use sites. Hopefully at the time we are working on this you have been given a google account by our tech department. If not, you can make your own. Once you create a google account, you will also have access to all the other tools that google provides such as gMail, Calendars, Documents and the like.

Create a google account

Organizing your content on a website
While a lot of people who create websites just throw all the information they have up onto the website and then wish their visitors good luck finding things, it pays to have a well organized website. Scot Hanna-Weir has a few opinions on how to organize a website but let's look at a couple of other people's first. We are looking specifically at course website organization first.

Eric Robert's Page All Content, All the Time!

Eric's site, especially for a teacher of Web Page Design, has impressively little on it except contact. Each week is it's own page and there is a way to navigate back to previous weeks at the top of the site. If you click on a class name, it takes you to the syllabus and he puts links to worksheets and assignments within the daily plan for each class.

Al Schmidt's Page A little flashier, but still contented

Al's site puts each class on it's own page and then the full calendar of lessons for that class on the page. There is a link back to the site's homepage and also a few links on the side to important pages like the district's home page and the high school page.

Scot's Organization Opinions
Here's what I would do.

1) Use a different page for each class 2) A page for contact information for you 3) A page of links to other interesting things, or a links section for each class

If you can use a navigation bar, it makes moving around your site a lot easier, but if you don't have a lot of separate pages, it isn't necessary. Avoid too much content on one page. If you are finding yourself doing a lot of scrolling, break the text up into subsections and make those separate pages.

Tecumseh Choirs Department website using google sites

Creating your google sites page
Creating a classroom website with google sites

Create your account and setup your site. Once you have created a new site, meet me back here.