At the beginning of each KidsTek middle school program session, our instructors like to hear feedback on what skills our students are interested in learning. Students have often told us they’d like to learn how to make web sites.
One of our KidsTek instructors in Aurora, Meme Loftin, has been using Weebly (www.weebly.com) to enable students to create web sites. Weebly is an online web site builder that anyone can use to create their own site with easy-to-use templates. People use Weebly for their businesses, to help sell a product, or in our case, to allow students to have a platform to share and express their interests online. North Middle School student Jacob Giuliano explains, “Wolves are my favorite animal so I really like that I can learn how to make my own web site about something that interests me. The whole process has been really cool.”
Weebly includes a feature called “Weebly for Education,” which makes it easy for instructors like Meme to sign up for a classroom account where she can monitor the content being added to each student’s web site. This is important to us at KidsTek because we know that teaching students about Internet safety and “digital footprints” help students better understand their presence online.
It’s always fun to see what ideas the students come up with when using tools like Weebly. We’re looking forward to seeing their final products this week!
