We Wove Weebly!

Sorry about the title. I just had to do it! My fifth grade students were recently researching various cultures around the globe and the affect that they had on the American culture. Rather than have the students make a boring PowerPoint or even the usual Prezi or Glog (which are all great but we use them a lot), I decided to take it one step further and have them create their own websites using Weebly for Education. They turned out AHHH-mazing! I was very impressed with my fifth grade kiddos! This was a very student centered project. The only requirements I gave them was that their website had to have at least 5 pages and 1 of those pages had to answer the question "How did this culture affect American culture?" The rest was completely up to them...the webmasters! For the first few minutes they flopped around like fish out of water because they aren't used to that kind of freedom of learning on their own (which opened my eyes greatly...but that's another post in itself.) Once they got with their groups of 3 or 4 and started organizing and coming up with their ideas on what they wanted to learn about their culture, they were off and running and the creativity was flowing! Weebly is a free website where I, as a teacher, created an account, and then had up to 40 student accounts. The websites can be published as private and are password protected so they are not out there for everyone to see. With the simple drag and drop interface it was easy for the kids to customize their pages with text and images. The kids had a great time with these websites and they presented their cultures like pros! Here's some screenshots below of their great creations!