Small victories with Google Sites

I spent the spring and summer creating a website that would be home base for a technology professional development program at CJ. I created it using Google Sites, partially because I was modeling it after a program that had been done on Google Sites and partially because I just wanted to explore yet another of Google's products.

I'm a little obsessed now.

I know that my work isn't the most complex when it comes to  web design. I still haven't learned HTML code (when I asked a friend who works in web publishing for a big newspaper about recommended font and font size for a text heavy website, his response that his paper's "tags are 1.4em on a line height of 1.6em" left me dumbfounded). And I still don't understand a lot of what goes on in the background of websites regarding analytics and search engines. But for designing a site that is really only meant for internal use at work, it was an excellent tool for this amateur.

The Tech Charge Challenge website is staying private right now, so I made a copy of the website (small victory when I discovered how!) to make public and removed any personal data from teachers. That's what I've linked here. It isn't perfect (still needs a few tweaks and tutorials), but I'm pretty proud.

A few weeks ago, I decided to make another, much simpler, website as a home for any and all technology-related professional development resources and opportunities at CJ. Small victories all over the place as I set up this page. I created links using images to represent my main websites. I embedded a Google calendar on an "announcement" page. I even figured out how to give only teachers at CJ permission to edit a "list" page (and only that page) so they can add web tools to the list. Now I'm ready to put tools into the list and find a reason to use other templates.

Sometimes on a Monday, we just need to celebrate those small victories.


For more info about Google Sites, check out...

• Beginner's Guide to Creating a Site from Google Site's Help Center
• Mary Fran's Getting Started with Google Sites (a Google Site from a Google Certified Teacher)
• 47 Page Guide to Google Sites for Teachers from Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers

Curious how you can use Google Sites in the classroom? Check out...

• How to Manage Classroom Digital Portfolios by Using Page-level Permissions in Google Sites from Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers
• 5 Ways to Use Google Sites in Schools from Richard Byrne
• Google Sites for Teacher Web Pages and Student Projects from Flipped Education - this page contains links to many example pages and resources

Google Driving: General Resources for Exploration

A recent faculty meeting really showed me how interested our teachers are in exploring the features of Google Drive and Apps. When given the freedom to choose between one of six ed tech topics to explore for an hour, an overwhelming majority of my colleagues flooded the "Google Drive" area of the library, inundating my few "experts" who were there to help people. A few others jumped in to assist their colleagues and if I understand correctly (I didn't really get to check in; I was leading a small group exploring Twitter for professional development), people really made progress in learning about this Google cloud thing that's all the rage.

However, I know some people will need reminders and tutorials, so I want to share some of my favorites here.  Whether revisiting how to share a Google doc or moving on to creating forms and analyzing the responses from them, we all need step-by-step instructions or visual help sometimes. So here are some favorites to get you started:

• Google Drive Help Center: That's right - they make the tools, so they better make some good resources to accompany them.  I usually find anything Google to be user-friendly, including these resources.  This link will take you to the main menu, but each topic takes you to a sub-menu, which then takes you to another menu; very specific help here.
  

• GCFLearnFree Google Documents: From the Goodwill Community Foundation's LearnFree program (a non-profit providing educational materials to help people around the world "learn the essential skills they need to live and work in the 21st century", the lessons/tutorials provided here are clear and easy to follow... and include quizzes. We won't talk about my score on the Google Drive quiz that I thought I could just breeze through - I didn't think about the questions enough at all and almost failed it.

• AnsonAlex YouTube Tutorials: This playlist contains a number of tutorials for those of us who are more visual and auditory learners.

Have a Google Drive/Apps tutorial that really helped you? Share it in the comments below!