Creating a Site

My American History Site

https://sites.google.com/site/americanhistorywithmrisaac/

     Creating the website was quite interesting. It is not as straightforward as the other apps. I had to use the tutorials to figure out the basics. However, after I got a handle on what I was doing and things started to feel more familiar, I was able to find what I needed.
     The only difficulty I had in the pages was moving images around. I decided to create a "history" course so I could put a timeline in and play with the images. It is easy to line the images up, but I could not find a drag and drop feature where I could move the images to any part of the page that I wanted and the text just simply wordwrap. Instead the images all acted like very large text. The only other qualm I had was that there were only three settings for the image sizes and not a bar or percentage drop box to adjust the size to what I wanted. Thankfully the images all shrank to an even size when I selected "small" in the size part of the tool bar for the images. Creating the time line was simple after that, it was just like creating one in Word.
     Another difficulty I had was with the way that I needed to lay out the site. I made a mistake and created the assignments page as being under the "American Presidents" page. The only I found to fix this was to delete the page completely and create a new page. I could not find in the tutorials or on my own a button like Sakai's reorder button where I could just move the page out from under "American Presidents."
     A fun part about playing with the site was that Google Forms links work. So I found that I could integrate Google Sites, Forms, and Sheets in order to give kids content, assessments, and grades. All I would have to do after creating the site would be to link the Forms in the site and then wait for the kids to take the quizzes or tests. The only drawback is that I could not find any way to keep kids from working to far ahead or skipping assignments. They would have access to all of the Forms if I linked them. Well, I just thought about it, I could just link the pages as the course goes on.
     The revision history was very straightforward but kind of scary. I only had two versions because I worked on the site in two long sessions. I was afraid I might click something wrong and revert my site back to the first version so I didn't play with it other than looking at the layout and watching the tutorial. I feel that it is a very good feature for if you make a major mistake and want to fix it or if you want to reformat something. I really want to use this for one of my future classes, it was difficult to come up with something for a whole class because I have not taught a classroom yet; but I did create a layout that I think I will use if I use Google Sites for one of my classes.