Due to Weebly’s straightforward interface and simple navigation, it is one of the most intuitive website builders that allows people with no coding skills to build and publish their websites for free. To create a website on Weebly, users need to create an account, choose a theme that suits their needs, name and design their website, and finally publish their website. One major benefit of Weebly is that it allows users to change themes freely, and the Weebly website builder will automatically apply the new theme to their sites. If users are not satisfied with what they create after publishing the sites, they can revisit the Weebly website editor to make changes and republish their sites.
In addition to a free plan, Weebly offers three paid plans-. The free plan is most suitable for basic use, but it comes with Weebly branding and doesn’t have a custom domain. Weebly has wide and varied ways for troubleshooting and customer support, including resource library and documents, community forum, and chat and email support.
When teaching online, staying connected with students and communicating with parents and guardians is essential. Creating a teacher website to serve as a learning community hub can help teachers foster an engaging educational environment. On a teacher website, teachers can provide lesson resources and class notes, post assignments or homework sheets, share activity information, and showcase student accomplishments. A teacher website could effectively keep students, parents, guardians, and other stakeholders in the loop.
Weebly can be used:Weebly provides around 50 free themes with example text, images, and pages, categorized by Portfolio, Personal, Blog, and more that teachers can customize to suit their needs. Before identifying a theme, teachers can preview each theme to see how it looks and functions on a full screen. When organizing content on different pages, teachers need to ensure that there is no irrelevant or outdated content and no broken links to enhance their websites’ navigation and structure features. To further extend the functionality of the websites, teachers can navigate through the Weebly App Center to search for different types of applications that fit their needs, whether it’s an FAQ section or contact forms. Sites created on Weebly work consistently in different browsers and can be accessed on different devices with varying screen sizes.
If teachers want to go beyond basic use to have advanced features, they will need to upgrade to pricing plans. The Premium Plan features specific to teachers’ needs include a custom domain name, unlimited storage, and password-protected pages. The Personal Plan allows teachers to connect to a custom domain; however, if teachers want to add more customization, such as removing square ads and having password protection on their websites, they will need to upgrade to the Professional Plan.
Weebly is also a great platform for developing high school students’ critical thinking, collaboration, and reflection skills. Teachers can create blogs and use the commenting feature to encourage high school students to share ideas and provide feedback to their peers. Teachers can also have them create a Weebly site for a presentation to show their understanding of a topic or a digital portfolio to reflect on what they have accomplished.
Before implementing Weebly, teachers should check with the school IT department to ensure they can use Weebly in class. One important thing to note is that the templates and multiple elements within Weebly-built websites are not ADA compliant. Therefore, teachers must take steps to promote inclusiveness by self-checking images, media, text, links, and pages to ensure all their students can navigate the websites, including disabled students.
Weebly identifies that they collect and use teachers’ and visitors’ data for improving and developing their services. Teachers’ data, including name, email address, mailing address, and phone number, will be saved once they create their account. Weebly makes it clear that their services are not intended to be used by children under the age of 13, which means that individuals under the age of 13 are not allowed to create or use accounts through Weebly. If they find that they have collected information provided by a child under 13, they will immediately delete the information.
The default visibility for a site created on Weebly is public, indicating that anyone can search to find the website and view all pages and content on the site. With the free version, teachers can hide certain pages from navigation. If they want to use a password to hide certain pages or the entire site, they must upgrade to a paid plan.