Choosing a Platform
Every Candidate Chooses the Platform that is Right for Them
Teacher Candidates at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Education should have full and complete control over their own webspace. For this reason, they are free to choose any platform for the development of their digital hub. They should also choose their own URL and their hosting provider.
Many teachers, including graduates of our B.Ed program, use one of the following platforms because they are free, very stable, and easy to use. We do not endorse these or propose that one is better than another. Rather, we list them here so that teacher candidates have a starting point for their own exploration and decision making.
Pros and Cons of these Platforms
In general, all of these web-hosting platforms allow users to create a professional-looking website without knowing anything about how to code a website. In just a few minutes, each of these platforms allow you to choose a site name & URL, pick a theme (often from hundreds of free templates) and create a basic navigational architecture. All of these allow you to add a blog and a static home page. And, all of these services host this website for you for free. So, no matter which of these you choose to use, none of them require you to purchase a domain name or to pay a yearly hosting fee.
Wordpress & Edublogs
Wordpress is one of the most widely used blogging and website design platforms on the web. On their website, they claim that Wordpress powers 28% of the Internet! That's a lot of websites! The DigitalLiteracies.ca website is made using Wordpress. So is the Jean-Paul Dionne Graduate Student Research Symposium website.
Edublogs is run on Wordpress. Basically, it is Wordpress -- but with the option to add student accounts so that you can create a classroom blog. Wordpress and Edublogs really are the best options for blogging. They were created for that purpose, so the design of the Wordpress platform is focused very much on that purpose. You can easily tag posts, categorize them and integrate images. Embedded video, though, is not possible on the free version. You can link to videos -- one work-around strategy that many people use is to post a static image of a video in a post and then place a hyperlink below that image. Also, the free versions of these platforms do not allow for customized URLs. So, your URL would be something like greatteacher.edublogs.org or greatteacher.wordpress.com
As you start out, that is totally fine -- everyone understands that this is a constraint of a free web platform and hosting service. As your site evolves, you may want to upgrade to a pro-version of the platform that allows you to customize your URL to your name or to something else -- but lots of people never do. The free, but branded version of their URL is fine. Another constraint to mention -- free versions allow for less storage space than paid versions. They impose limitations on file-size of multimedia content as well. So, this is something to know up front.
Heliya Mirshahi's Digital Hub (created in 2017)
Google Sites
As a uOttawa student, your @uOttawa.ca email address is actually an institutional gmail. This means that you have access to Google Drive for file storage and for document creation. Plus, with your uOttawa.ca email address and password, you can create a Google Site for free. Recently, Google Sites improved its user interface. This EdTech UOttawa website is a Google Site. I created it in 2016, before the new templates and user interface were launched. This site, created by Jessica Coleman, a 2017 B.Ed. graduate as a mock-up of what is possible to make in about an hour with the New Google sites, is also a Google site. Jessica's real digital hub is created with Weebly, but the interfaces are so similar it was easy for her to make a basic Google Site version pretty quickly.
There are many possibilities with the Google Sites platform including the ability to insert Google Presentations, YouTube Videos and Google Documents directly on Google Site webpages. If you opt for Google Sites, please remember that any document you share on your website needs to have open sharing settings. I show you how to open the sharing settings for any Google document and how to insert a google document on a Google Sites page in the screencast below.
The constraints of this platform -- the URL includes sites.google.com -- which isn't the easiest URL for people to remember. And Google Sites doesn't have the best blogging platform. You can insert a Gadget called "Recent Posts" onto a page (when editing, go to Insert on the top menu and select the Recent Posts Gadget) and then you can call that page your Blog -- but it isn't the same sort of user experience as Wordpress for blogging.
Weebly
In 2017, most B.Ed. candidates chose Weebly for their website development. Reasons for this include the drag & drop user interface that is intuitive and really easy to use and a wide range of professional-looking templates. Plus, Weebly for Education doesn't post ads and allows you to create a class website with student accounts that are privacy protected. Weebly is also a very stable webhost. The free version offers 500 MB of storage space for images, videos etc. which may not be enough in time -- but start is very good. The major constraint -- the URL includes weebly.com.
Lianna Krantzberg's Digital Hub (created 2015-2017)
Kelly Barker's Digital Hub (created in 2017)
Andrew Gesing's Digital Hub (created in 2017)
Features List at Weebly for Education
WIX
Wix is another free webhost and website building platform that has an intuitive user interface. Wix offers many professionally designed templates for portfolio or CV-style websites. Wix does not offer an Education version -- their business model focuses on enterprises -- but many B.Ed. students have happily and successfully created digital hub websites using WIX.
Laura Parlee's Digital Hub (created in 2017)
Leanne Takman's Digital Hub (created in 2017)
Hillary Walter's Digital Hub (created in 2017)
What about Facebook or Tumblr?
Go ahead. Use these tools! However, as you consider the design of your professional digital presence, think about curation. Think about the affordances (i.e., what the tool can do) and the constraints (i.e., the limitations) of the applications you're using. A social media feed (e.g., Facebook) can do certain things. It is a great space for sharing recent, in-the-moment work. Information shows up in one long feed -- which is great if you are a member of the group and you see topics in the feed. However, this platform is less ideal for creating a space where information is curated purposefully around a topic, or for a particular purpose. Blogs are better for that because you can tag posts, and categorize them. If you're most interested in posting your work to a social media space, then consider using a service like about.me as your landing page and then just link all of your social media to it. You might also consider creating a visual CV by using a service such as visualCV.com or PictoCV. You can link your work to your landing page -- which is very much in the spirit of the HUB. Create the single location for people to access ALL of your social feeds and then have a fun and creative time of it creating a professional digital presence that is very much YOU.