Guide to Helping Students Create Project Websites
I have come to really enjoy having students create websites as a cumulative assessment for projects for a variety of reasons. First, the act of creating something that they see every day makes them more critical consumers of that medium. While working on her website, one student suddenly realized, "Ms. Myers...anyone can make a website!" The fact that we as educators might take that understanding for granted is a danger. Second, quality websites allow for students to truly consider how to organize text and support that text with images or audio and/or video in the same way they would for a paper but in an interactive way. Finally, a website is meant for a larger audience and the creation of a product whose audience is not limited to the class and its teacher allows for a higher level of engagement and motivation.
I do, however, have some advice for first- time teachers helping students make websites. Students will need some time to work out their fascination with the template choices, color choices, fonts, multimedia options, etc. I recommend giving them time toward the end of the period to learn the basics of the web program in a way that does not require addition of academic content. I often have students complete a series of steps to show that they know how to do basic operations (create text, create a new page, upload an image and a video, create a hyperlink, etc.), all while creating the "About Me" page of their website. This is also a great opportunity to discuss with students the realities of their digital footprints and make suggestions about how to identify themselves by only their first names and not give too much information that others might be able to use. I feel strongly about our role as educators in helping students navigate their web presence rather than banning it at school and assuming they will learn what they need to learn either at home or on their own.
After this first introduction to web design, I often return to the art of writing a great paragraph. We leave the computer behind and focus our attention on the arguments our research has uncovered and how to best convey those arguments in small chunk paragraphs. If I have time, I like to have students write a paper prior to transferring the argument to a website. This allows them to stay focused on their arguments and the evidence and analysis that supports their argument and not get distracted, once again, by the bells and whistles of templates and multimedia. I also like to use paper versions of the web templates that students can use to understand how their paragraphs fit into a coherent organizational system on the web.
After all this, we get back on the computers where students begin to transfer their edited and organized work into a website. This provides yet another opportunity to discuss the choices students made about pages and navigation choices to both keep their reader engaged and help them to understand the argument being presented. This is also the moment to ask students what visuals would best advance the argument of an individual page and how to cite Creative Commons images and create captions that help the reader see the connection between text and image (this applies to video as well). I also have students think about hyperlinks and the fine balance between too many that prove a distraction and take readers away from the page and too few that limit the interactivity and possibilities presented in the website format. Students often seek out examples of this on other websites that I suggest. Here, students are evaluating text and websites in a way that is directly practical to the skill they are learning.
My final step in the process of creating a website is peer and parent review. We create a rubric together based on what we have learned about making websites and use that rubric to evaluate and make final suggestions to the web designer groups.
My favorite web design sites are weebly.com (used for National History Day website competition), sites.google.com, and wix.com. They all include videos to help you and your students understand how to create a website and they all offer tech support to answer questions that come up. This is by no means a comprehensive list and other options might better serve your needs.
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