Websites for Students by Students

Earlier this week I had a teacher email me about creating websites with students. His intent was to use Microsoft Publisher to allow the students to create the websites, and then try to figure out a way that they could post them in MOODLE, but once again one of the students had another idea. The student suggested to the teacher that they use Wix.com and the teacher was asking if that was an appropriate service to use with the students. Since the teacher was wanting to use Wix with 5th & 6th grade students, I immediately went to Wix's Terms of Use which states, in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), that they cannot serve individuals under the age of 13. Therefore, I dugg down into my Diigo bookmarks and found two alternatives to Wix: Weebly and Yola. Again I immediately dove into both sites Terms of Use and found that once again, they were set-up to collect information about their users, therefore they were subjected to COPPA - but then I noticed a link on the Weebly website: Weebly for Education.

Needless to say, Weebly got it right with the education version. It allows a teacher to sign-up for an account and then create anonymous student accounts which can all be managed by the teacher. There is a limitation of 40 student accounts, but you can increase that amount by recruiting other teachers to use Weebly for Education. It has all the features of the regular Weebly site as well.

In the end, all three companies have a nice product, but Weebly did a great job of giving teachers with students under the age of 13 a place to build websites (and not with Microsoft Publisher!).