Weebly

Hi All,

I somehow managed to work my way around the Weebly tool to design my own website. You can my view my website by clicking here. Overall I found this task quite easy to complete as the clear tabs and available help icon scaffolded the design process. Personally I believe this technological tool provides two major benefits for the classroom. Weebly can be used to scaffold the learning journey and engage student in a designed WebQuest/ inquiry task or it can simply be an engaging assessment task to escape the overused poster or PowerPoint assessment tasks. I have identified some pros and cons of these two situations.

Using Weebly as an engaging assessment task for students
(E.g. presentation of Australian Parliament and its functions in a creative website.)

Advantages
-Engaging and authentic task for students incorporating web design into other KLAs
-Ownership and responsibility for work as it is published on the wide web
-Easy functions for students to manipulate
-Promotes creativity
-Encourages thorough understanding of target content because students need to explain their understanding to others.
-Gives scope for collaboration with peers depending on the size of the task
-Could be used as an extension task for student as oppose to the ordinary PowerPoint or poster tasks
-Students and caregivers can access websites from home.

Disadvantages
-Students with minimal exposure to technology will need extra support and computer labs made available
-Students might lose focus on content and target editing functions of the website
-School computer labs are high in demand and this might hinder the completion of the task
-Parents might become too heavily involved in the construction process and thus task will not present child’s ability levels
-Unlike the features of a wiki, only the designers can add comments and information to the website.

Using Weebly to design inquiry website for students.
(e.g. WebQuest exploring the causes and effects of global warming)

Advantages
-Engaging and authentic task for students as they access a variety of mediums
-Step by step scaffolding of the task requirements
-Easy functions for students to manipulate
-Promotes exploration of resources students wouldn’t normally access
-Hands-on approach to learning the content
-Gives scope for collaboration with peers depending on the size of the task
-Can incorporate different tasks and extension tasks for students depending on their ability level (e.g. provide extra reading resources for higher ability students)
-Can include online educational games to add variety to the learning journey
-Students and caregivers can access websites from home.

Disadvantages
-Students with minimal exposure to technology will need extra support and computer labs made available
-Students might lose focus on content and become distracted with the game component of the task
-School computer labs are high in demand and this might hinder the completion of the task
-Parents might become too heavily involved in the inquiry and thus task will not present child’s ability levels
-Unlike the features of a wiki, only the designers can add comments and information to the website.

I have further reflected on this Weebly tool as an inquiry website for students and believe that it correlates with the Big 6 Framework designed by Eisenberg and Berkowitz. This is evident as learning manager can utilize this framework during the design of the class website to ensure the 6 key stages are included and thus the learning journey will be adequately scaffolded for students. I had a more in depth discussion with Jasmine Camps about this connection and I also related websites and the Big 6 Framework to the TELSTAR model of inquiry. You can view this discussion here.

Let me know what your thoughts are on this connection.
Regards
Pauline