Sites

Zoe took us through a series of different levels of complexity of use for Google Sites

using an Olympic theme:

My page from the challenge: https://sites.google.com/site/letsgoolympic/david-h

Bronze

• To replace presentations - students collect and embed resources
  • Ian's examples from his school were interesting
• To present eportfolios
  • This is something I've been working on
  • - my slant though is to use them for reflection and as a virtual binder
  • - not just to present individual students' best work
• Collating classroom resources
  • - I do this for my classes.
  • - With my older students, they play a part in creating resources for a shared revision site
• Sharing CPD resources with colleagues
  • - I used to do this with my school Moodle site in Kuwait
  • - I should pilot doing this with sites as we've been integrating Google Apps rather than a single VLE solution
  • - When I do, I'll add my examples to this page
• Apps landing page
  • - It's a simple but very effective idea, why haven't I done something like this?
  • - Provide a single well-known place for students to go to and find the tools they need to learn
  • - I like the idea of creating a memorable domain for student apps, different to the school's main domain

Silver

• Free domains and hosting
  • - Subdomains: perfect for student project sub-sites
  • eg: development of ongoing project work for things like GVC and CyberFair
  • - I used a 301 re-direct for Frenople.com and KuiKui.info - our Year 9 student mini enterprise sites
  • (bit clunky, but it makes it clearer that it's part of the school's domain - adding a subdomain would probably help here)
  • - It is easy enough to add a different domain to sites - but you need to chance the CNAME entry for each subdomain you want it to point to
  • - To me this raises the question, who hosts your DNS? Your registrar or you?
  • - I prefer to be in charge, but if my VPS goes down, so will the DNS entry for the Google Sites domain...
  • - My GCT Action Plan project for www.inspiracies.com has had its CNAME entry edited to point to a Google Site.
  • - Moving it to a Google Apps (free version) site was an "interesting" experience though...
  • - You can share ownership with a user of the new service, they can copy the site to the new service, but it doesn't copy Google Apps Scripts over...
  • - And then, when you do that man, you encounter issue 546...
  • - So, I'm looking for a solution...
  • (when I play with some more domains and subdomains, I'll list them here)...
• Templates
  • -Loads of templates already available, make some for your students' projects, show them how to customise the look/feel
• Four different page types
  • Web page
  • List
  • Filing Cabinet
  • Announcements

Each has their own range of uses - it is worth considering the purpose of the page as well as the students' backgrounds

• Mirror Docs in sites to conserve resources
  • As school sites grow, this can be an issue - there is a maximum storage capacity for all sites on a domain,
  • Hosting large multimedia files within Docs accounts etc can help keep
• Use lists for homeworks
  • One idea to consider: rather than using a blog/annoncements page
  • a list allows the sort order to be changed, so a term's homework assignments
  • can easily be broken down and analysed

Gold

• Design like a pro
  • - keep it simple with lots of white space
• Horizontal navigation bars
  • - One important thing I learned, creating a horizontal menu for students often
  • makes it far easier for them to organise a site for an audience
• favicons - just upload it
  • Adding a favicon.ico file to a Google site as an attachment in the Manage Site area is really easy...
  • (this links to one favicon generator I use - there are plenty of others around...)