Group 1 Digital Tools: Website use and analysis

I set up an account with Weebly recently, and had a bit of a look at the way they do things.

I've built a website before, so this isn't anything new to me. Since I'm not a geek, I used the visual editor for that rather than HTML. So visual editors are nothing new either. They're pretty much standard across blogs, wikis and website builders, apart from a few minor differences in their layout. So before I got into Weebly, I already had an idea in my mind of how it was going to work. I was also a bit concerned, because even with the visual editor, building a website is pretty time-consuming and requires a lot of help if you've never done it before. Fortunately for me I'd had tutorial videos and my brother (a sysadmin and computer tech at a school) on the other end of the phone.

He wears this shirt whenever he comes over. I don't know why.

My concern was that because of what I had discovered during my website-building experiences, I was worried that school students would need a lot of lessons to be able to build a website. In this regard, Weebly is refreshingly easy to use.

Weebly takes the visual editor a couple of steps further than other website builders. It utilizes a drag-and-drop interface that takes care of page formatting, image insertion, video and media embedding and more. This would enable students to create a website with a minimum of fuss.

Applications:

Student:

Websites are a great way to conduct and present a research project. Students can add text information, photos, scans, images, sound bites, video clips and animations to enhance their work. A teacher that I talked to had at one point designed a unit of work on Australian history as follows: In small groups, the students had to imagine themselves as the early settlers and convicts that came to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Their task was to build a website in order to show their families back home in the British Isles what life was like in early Australia.

Teacher:

A teacher can put a website together in order to direct a certain activity or unit of work. The pages may have different activities on them, and would direct the student down a certain avenue of investigation.
An example of this is a website that my wife Shelley put together as an assessment item last year. It looks at the planets in the solar system, and their unique features. If you look through the pages of the student space and teacher space, you can see how it all ties together. The students are directed by the instructions and information on the website, undertake the research, then out together a PowerPoint presentation.

Data entry for group 1 ICT tools is basically the same, either by HTML or a visual editor. The fundamental difference between the three tools that were demonstrated is the level of collaboration and interaction that they allow. Wikis allow contributions and changes to the body of knowledge from a large number of people, if desired. Websites traditionally allow little interaction. They are usually used to present information for people to absorb. Blogs do not allow changes to the body of knowledge, but comments are possible, with the ability to reply and discuss the topic being a key feature. Social media could possibly also fall into this category, if it could be broadly considered to be "micro-blogging".