Matt Miller is a big Google Guru in the Ed Tech world. This video is a couple years old so there may have been some updates that he did not cover here. One update that I know is that we can control if our sites our seen internally in DoDEA only or publicly. 

If you want to have your younger students create a Google Site for a project, but you don't want them to spend a ton of time actually creating the site, you can create a template for them to copy. There is a bit of a process to doing so, but it is worth it in the end. This is a great option for book reports, research projects, or portfolios. Watch the tutorial to learn how to do it.