Perhaps others are clearer about the difference these days between a website and a blog, but it seems to me the boundary lines are pretty blurry.
For students, a number of blog applications seem very easy to use and work well in my classes. You can find more information about these tools on these specific “The Best…” lists:
The Best Places Where Students Can Write Online
Visually, however, I can see how a website might offer more creative possibilities. So in this list I’ll share my picks for The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create A Website.
This list is focused on tools accessible for English Language Learners and non-tech-savvy computer users, and that ability, I believe, is an essential one for those two groups. The other features also had to be very easy to use. Finally, the service had to be offered free-of-charge.
Here are my choices:
HOW TO CREATE A TEACHER WEBSITE IN 3 STEPS is from ELTcation. Personally, I think starting a blog from Edublogs is the way to go.
Just Paste It is a very, very simple ways to create websites. They’re ideal for teachers or students who are not very tech savvy, and just want a place to add links or, for example, if students have an assignment where they might need to collect images and then describe them. No registration is required.
Weebly and their app just for educators and students, Weebly For Education
Zoho has announced Zoho Sites, a super-easy “drag-and-drop” website builder. It doesn’t get much easier to create a nice-looking website. You can read more about it at TechCrunch.
Striking.ly is a very easy tool for creating a website. I particularly like the fact that you can grab images off the Web to insert in them. You still need an invitation to register, but I received one a day after I sent in a request.
I discovered Populr.me awhile ago, and liked how easy it let you create websites. However, at that time, they had a very strict, and small, limit on the number of pages you could publish. They’ve just removed that limit, so I’m adding it to this list.
MailerLite looks like a decent place to create free websites.
Mural lets you make very simple websites.
GrapeDrop lets you make simple and small websites for free.
Olitt lets you create free websites.
Wix is a fairly easy site that lets you create a website or content that you would like to embed into a website or a blog. The final product can look pretty neat. There’s so much you can create that I think it would be a little too overwhelming to English Language Learners. I also suspect that my mainstream students would would want to spend far too much time using it to make their creations look cool and spend less time on the actual content. However, teachers, I think, might want to use it to create content their students would then access.
Yola is another website-building application and seems very similar to Wix, but appears to be just a little less complicated to use.
Adobe Spark looks like an amazing new free tool that lets you create visually attractive quotes, web pages and videos. Richard Byrne, as usual, has created an excellent video showing how it works.
Google Sites has opened its new version to the public for creating websites. You can read all about it at TechCrunch.
8b is a new, and free, website builder that looks pretty good to me.
Leia looks like an intriguing tool for building websites.
Talium looks like a very easy website builder.
Brick looks like a pretty easy tool for creating websites.
mmm is a new tool for creating websites.
Carrd is an easy way to make a simple website.
Ten Google Sites Tutorials for New and Experienced Users is from Richard Byrne.
Daftpage looks like an easy tool for creating websites.
Canva has made lots of changes and upgrades, including adding the ability to create a website. Learn all about them here.
Butternut AI lets you create a website using AI.
mmm is a free and easy webpage-builder.
As always, feedback is welcome.
If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.
Indeed both tools are good for easy create a web presence; also for teachers we highly recommend to visit http://www.standardstoolbox.com – they can find there a lot of free teacher tools.
Great list, Larry! Have you used Weebly? Very easy to use, drag-and-drop interface. Includes blogging capabilities, as well.
I have used Weebly for about a year. Simple to use, and fairly robust. I didn’t know about the educator accounts until I read your post. You can sell others souls… er refer others (5) to be upgraded to a pro account. You get 10 student accounts under you for every referral, or you can buy 10 student accounts for 10$.
Blogger via google apps is fully free, methinks, if your school signs on, but this is a nice alternative for individuals. (I’m with the author in the fuzzy blog/site line department)
Oh- the site: room141.weebly.com
Note that I haven’t figured out how to get contact page emails past the spam filter in outlook, hotmail, or gmaii :(.
I just finished a 10-day project using synthasite. The 6th grade students and I learned it quickly, and we look forward to using it again. I set up the accounts using 10minutemail.com. Students worked in pairs.
I couldn’t of done it without Larry.
Here a sample.
http://bogus.synthasite.com/
PJVermont
Here’s another link. I invite your comments and questions.
http://bogusaniact.synthasite.com/
PJVermont
Hi Larry:
Every semester, my students in the School of Education are required to create an ePortfolio with the web creator of their choice. I have included all of your choices as suggestions for these students, along with Weebly, PageFlakes, and DoodleKit.
Thanks for your dedication.
-j-
Weebly also works pretty great: You don’t need to know any HTML or web-editing skills, and it has tons of useful features.
I use it for my class website: http://jblackstone.weebly.com
There is another impressive website builder Web Start Today that allows creation of
professional and attractive websites. You don’t need any technical knowledge to use the intuitive and user friendly builder. It offers a lot of features like beautiful designs,
business specific content, images, color themes, SEO, hosting, monitoring, technical
support etc. Anyone can easily create an attractive website and get it published without any hassles.
Thanks for adding http://Populr.me – we have a lot of teachers using us for their curriculum! We’re different in that we aren’t really for making websites – we’re for making single web pages to use in your daily communications.
Students use us for school reports & research projects – not really websites. Its just a single page 🙂
The whole genesis for our platform is that a ‘website’ and even a blog require more effort than is sometimes necessary. Because of this, we often revert back to PDF/Doc files to hold our info… but these are flat & lack any interactive data. So why not bring the web to the masses to use in their daily communications?
Last, I think this is a new space that is emerging – we call it Micropublishing. Similar to how Twitter reduced the complexity of a blog, we want to reduce the complexity of putting something on the web. A website can be complex… but anyone can create a single page 🙂
Hope this helps!
NLH
Nice post! Check also http://puzl.com/. Very intuitive, free and ads free tool
!