CREATING A GOOGLE SITE
Blog Post Agenda:
1. What is a Google Site?
2. Techie Teachers’ Tricks for Creating a Google Site
3. End-of-Blog-Post Bonus (Google Search Education)
1. What is a Google Site?
Google Sites is a great tool for creating webpages. It works seamlessly with other Google services allowing users to embed Google Docs, Calendar, YouTube, Picasa albums, etc. Teacher, student, and classroom websites have gained tremendous popularity.
Among the many benefits of teacher websites I would mention:
-they improve school-home communication
-they eliminate many parent phone calls and notes
-they help both teacher and student stay organized
-they help students take ownership of their learning
-they improve students’ digital skills
-they facilitate learning beyond classroom walls
-they can provide an virtual space for collaborative learning
2. Techie Teachers’ Tricks for Creating a Google Site
I will provide here annotated screenshots and links to other resources that would help you create your Google Site. I created the following screenshots to help my students build their first website.
First, you’ll have to go to http://sites.google.com and then click on the red tab that says CREATE. Next, you will either choose a blank template or one already created. I always started with a pre-made template.
After you did all these, click on the red CREATE button one more time.
The following screenshot shows you how to add pages to your website. The template you picked comes most likely with certain pages. Just go ahead and add the pages you want, and later you will delete the pages that came with the template and you don’t need on your website.
You created and named the pages you wanted on your website, but they are not visible yet. The next 5 screenshots show you how to do that.
Click “Add Page” to add it to the navigation bar. Do this for all the pages you created. Afterwards you can delete the pages that came with your template and you don’t want on your website.
Once you have your pages, you can start editing them. I created 5 pages on this website: About, Syllabus, Projects, Resources, and Blogs. To edit any of these pages, you just click on one of them, and then click on the pen at the top (see the red arrow). Afterwards you can start typing or adding content (using the INSERT button, see below) to your page. Last step is obviously SAVE. 🙂
The Insert button is really a key button. That’s where you need to go whenever you want to add content from outside sources to your website, including Google documents. To do this, you need to go to Insert, then Google Drive (see the third column, fourth position).
Who do you want your site to be visible to? Do you want your website to be public, private, or visible to a specific group of people?
Congrats! You have your own Google Site! Once you sign in to Google account (Google gmail), all of your Google products accounts are a click away. The easiest way is just to click on the 9 little squares you see at the top right corner of your email address, and it will take you to SITE, GMAIL, etc…
For other ideas and tutorials, check out the Educational Technology and Mobile learning website here and here.
Blogger is the Google product for blogs. If you want to import your Blogger into your Google Site, that’s possible. Here‘s how.
3. End-of-Blog-Post Bonus
(Google Search Education)
We live in an era when it is crucial for students to know how to do effective web searches when looking for answers online. They need to know how to find reliable sources, how to curate content, and how to critically evaluate the content and the sources they come across online. They need to know how to quickly find the right information. Google provides provides educators and parents with a great resource called Google Search Education. Briefly put, this is nothing else but How do I Google it?
On Google Search Education you can do any of the following four things:
*Lesson Plans and Activities– download lesson plans to develop your students’ search literacy skills; browse lessons for beginners, intermediate, and advanced here.
*Power Searches– improve your search skills and learn advanced tips with online lessons and activities.
*A Google a Day Challenges– put your students’ search skills to the test with these trivia challenges. A Google a Day Challenge is a great idea. Students need to surf the internet to find the answer to different questions from 4 different domains: culture, geography, history, or science.
*Live Trainings– join Google experts for live search trainings or watch past trainings from search experts at Google.
You can also use this great Lesson Plan Map which includes Common Core State Standards and ISTE alignments. Great visual of how these lessons are structured!
Until next time get creative, be inspired, and grow! 🙂
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Fondly,
Margo
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Techie Teachers' Tricks 