Instructify

BY REBECCAH HAINES

No matter how much you want to deny it, cool names and flashy advertising is often what draws you to try out a product. Well, with Weebly.com, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t check it out because I liked the name. Of course, once I got to the site, I found it to be a very simple website maker, and something that teachers might like to use in their classrooms.

For teachers, Weebly offers a very easy way to create a class website and blog. It is different from some other website creation tools in that you can have both a traditional “static” website as well as the interactive blog component. This would allow a teacher to offer critical class information as well as provide a forum for student/teacher discussion and parent feedback.

Also, for people not familiar with building websites, you really don’t have to know anything except how to click a mouse. There is a tutorial that leads you through the creation of your first website and adding things like pictures, text, files, etc. It is pretty much as simple as dropping and dragging. Weebly has some advanced features such as adding audio and video buttons for which you have to pay, but the basics that you get for free are really quite good. Here is a sample teacher website I created in about 15 minutes.

For students, I could see this as another resource to allow students to “show what they know” in a techie way. Rather than make a poster or write a report, students can use Weebly to create a website. It’s really so simple that I think even elementary students, with minimal adult support, could build a website using Weebly. Here is another quick example I made of a way students might use Weebly.

There are many website-building apps out there, but Weebly is one of the simplest and most effective I’ve worked with. And it has a cool name.

Weebly

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