Pros- Because Weebly.com is a website builder, students can create and keep their own websites/blogs forever (or as long as they feel like it).
- Weebly for Education is helpful because we can monitor student websites/blogs. We can also make them private. - Both Weebly and Weebly for Education allow students to post multimodal compositions on them (cartoons, pictures, videos, presentations, etc) - Both versions of Weebly have helpful tutorials on YouTube. |
Cons
- Students have reported only being able to add 5 pages to their sites, even though I haven't been able to resolve that issue (Weebly let me add more than 5).
- The free versions limit some of the tools, limiting what students can work with when composing. - Weebly for Education doesn't allow students to keep their own sites after the class is over. |
Weebly is a very intuitive and feature-rich platform for creating a free website. For those reasons, it's a great resource for teachers and students. This original version of Weebly is independent, meaning students own the websites they make. Depending on your teaching philosophy, you may want the ability to moderate/monitor the websites students create.
Weebly for Education includes all the tools found on Weebly plus features built specifically for education. Weebly for Education offers bulk creation of student accounts (up to 40 for free) which teachers can manage and moderate. Students can create their own websites and blogs using the accounts that you create for them. |
Student Examples
ENGL 1010 CCB ENGL 0100 Andrea In terms of students, Weebly for Education is less about making something to carry beyond a particular course and more about a class project. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on what you want students to "do" with their work. If you want students to have a domain of one's own, Weebly.com is the place to go. Although instructors cannot monitor the progress from their end, as long as students are publishing any edits, websites can be checked throughout the semester. I want transferability, so I probably wouldn't use Weebly for Education. I want students to own their work, present it for a public audience, and consider rhetorical choices as author and creator. Weebly for Education may be too restrictive for those goals. What do you think? |