One of the questions that I am frequently asked revolves around selecting a platform for making a classroom website. There are two tools for that purpose that I recommend more than any others. Those are Weebly and Google Sites. There are a few factors to consider when choosing which one is right for you and your students. In this post I’ll highlight those factors to consider.

Weebly
Weebly has two product offerings that teachers can use. There is the standard or consumer version of Weebly that anyone can use. There is also a Weebly for Education product. For the purposes of this post I am focusing on Weebly for Education.

Weebly for Education gives you access to lots of great-looking design templates that are easy to customize. Weebly for Education sites support the inclusion of just about anything you might want to embed into them including Flipgrid grids and Padlet walls along with all of the standard things like pictures, videos, and audio files.

What really makes Weebly for Education different from the consumer version of Weebly is the ability for teachers to create classroom accounts in which they manage their students’ usernames and passwords. Through those accounts students can contribute to one classroom site and or develop their own individual sites. Students whose accounts are created by their teachers don’t need to have email addresses.

Here’s my video overview of Weebly for Education.

Google Sites

Google Sites is a convenient option for building a classroom website if your school uses G Suite for Education. You and your students can easily access Google Sites from your Google Drive dashboard or by going to Sites.Google.Com.

Google Sites is a part of your G Suite account which makes it convenient and easy to display any file that you have stored in your Google Drive. The integration with your G Suite account also makes it easy to add Google Calendars to pages in your Google Sites.

A common complaint about Google Sites is the lack of design flexibility (although it has improved of late). The other common complaint about Google Sites is that it can be finicky when it comes to trying to embed media that is not hosted on a Google service.

Here’s my short overview of how to get started with Google Sites.

Bottom line: Google Sites is a convenient choice if your school already uses G Suite for Education. Otherwise, I favor Weebly for Education.