Internet Tools: Weebly for Education

Weebly is currently one of the most popular website builders available on the web, with over forty million sites in existence today.  Their award winning website builder is extremely user friendly, comes with a variety of elegant and highly responsive themes (works equally well on both desktop and mobile devices), and is highlighted by a great app store which provides many additional features that you can add to your website with a few easy clicks. 

Weebly has Android and Apple apps available that allow Weebly users to create new and edit existing Weebly sites on the go. Their new Weebly for iOS application has been designed to turn the iPad into a creative tool specifically developed for tactile site building.

Weebly for Education (https://education.weebly.com/), which is completely free for up to 40 students per teacher, provides educators the opportunity to create classroom websites as well as host student e-portfolios/projects with many of the great features from the standard platform. However, the free version of web builder limits each student to one site containing up to 5 pages. If you upgrade to PRO each student will get access to all PRO features of Weebly and will be able to publish 10 websites with unlimited pages.

In addition to many of the great features Weebly offers, a teacher may login to their “teacher accounts” and easily manage a safe and protected work environment for their students.  Understanding that privacy is of the utmost importance for students, websites created by students are under the complete control of their respective teachers at all times.   Teachers control all comments posted as well as publishing rights for all websites hosted via their classroom dashboard.  An additional perk for using Weebly for Education is creating sites which are free of advertising, free from bandwidth restrictions, and storage caps.

Weebly for Education is definitely a tool that should be considered for any educator looking to provide additional e-learning experiences.  It delivers a safe and secure online working environment, provides teachers with additional classroom controls, and provides support for the implementation blended learning which combines online digital media with traditional classroom methods.