Google Sites is a website builder that works well for presenting simple information. The learning curve is very quick and it’s extremely easy to use once you know how it works.
Google Sites is ad-free and is included with your Champlain Google account - and it’s also included with your students’ Google accounts, too. That means you not only can use Sites yourself, but ask your students to build them as part of assignments - in some cases, building a Site is a great alternative to a paper or Slides presentation.
Google Sites integrates extremely well with other G-Suite applications like Docs, Slides, YouTube, etc., which makes it a great choice for many academic uses.
It also has many of the same sharing settings that other G-Suite applications have, which is handy because it allows you to make a basic website that is public, limited to the Champlain community only, or limited to just a few select users in the community. This increases its potential as an academic tool because it can serve as a private digital gallery or portfolio that is shared only with the student(s) whose work is in the portfolio and you as the instructor.
Google Sites’ feature list is still short – it covers the basics but doesn’t offer many advanced features (although more are being added over time). However, for many people and many purposes, Google Sites’ simplicity and user-friendliness are just the right thing.
Some ways you might use Google Sites in your flex-hybrid courses include:
As a gallery or portfolio of the work of a group of students or a class section - for example, some instructors use it as a way to showcase students’ final projects
As a digital portfolio in which individuals or small groups of students collect and curate their written or artistic work over the course of a semester
As a way to collect documentation showing progress in project-based learning
As a way for students (or groups) to present research findings. This can be a nice alternative to the conventional research paper format because it allows direct linking to sources and the posting of multimedia content related to the research topic.
As a way for students to collaborate on a project (even if the final presentation format is not a Site)
As a “knowledge base” or “wiki” on the topic of study for the course, to which every student is expected to contribute.