Get Your Students Writing with Weebly
February 02, 2019
Get Your Students Writing with Weebly
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Weebly
We have a variety of teachers and students who use Weebly in a variety of ways including digital portfolios, websites, blogs, student projects, and teacher reflections. Teachers are often looking for a way in which students can learn to share their voice and information with a greater audience. What we are finding is that teachers are promoting the idea of students creating a website or blog as part of a greater assignment or project in which they keep track of what they are doing and have check-ins where they post about what they are doing and what they have accomplished. Our English and Science Departments seem to use it the most, but this is an app that can be used in any discipline or subject matter.
- Great drag and drop website or blog builder which lets students spend more time writing and gathering information than learning how to put a website together.
- Professional look and feel with a modern touch. Students can upload a background or banner image and really make a basic site or blog look professional in minutes.
- Love the option for students to decipher between building a full blown website or a blog. Often, if students are blogging, they don't need the whole gamut of site pages, etc. This lets them target their audience and style.
- They offer a free version which is great for education and student made sites.
- The embed code option is great for teachers creating a website so that they can embed other apps they use daily like padlet, thinglink, flipgrid, etc.
- Wish there was a way to track website revision history when making changes/reversions.
- Data and analytics features, which are great resources when teaching students about blogging and their effect to a wider audience is limited. Something more closely resembling what WordPress offers would be great. This hurts using Weebly as a blogging app.
- The program is simple to use. Sometimes customization seems limited because of it.
- Weebly has helped students share their voice to a greater worldwide audience and learn to write in a digital platform.
- Students have been able to learn modern skills of using social media platforms and promoting events using digital software and apps.
- This has helped limit printing with students and teachers alike when creating digital portfolios.
Overall, Weebly is a fantastic app to integrate into the classroom or school setting. I usually give students an option when designing web pages/websites and Weebly is often the choice. However, when it comes to pure blogging and older students learning how to track their digital footprint, I usually lean toward having them use WordPress. But Weebly is simpler with less time needed to get started as opposed to WordPress. Students need to understand simple HTML, embedding other tools/apps, and the basics of web design without the coding/HTML background and Weebly helps support this.