Recently we had an assignment in school to play around with adding information to a web page. I enjoyed using Google sites for this project. I have used Google sites in the past but I went straight for the new sites. I was not incredibly pleased with the new sites I must say. I am not sure what the problem was at the time. I remember thinking that I couldn't do enough with it and I felt like my site was too plain. I gave up on ever using these sites again and moved on to Weebly.
I am not sure if I just like the old sites better or if I liked having other people to bounce ideas off of. Building a site or adding to a site is time-consuming. When we first opened the page and started editing, I could feel my heart rate rise and my mind was filling with thoughts like "How are we going to get this done?" and "Where do we even start, this is too much!". Being in a group helped to keep things focused and moving fast.
At one point, one of my team members erased a bunch of the sample text, and I couldn't help but flinch. I think if I had been working on this myself I would have left the sample text until I knew exactly what I wanted to replace it with. I also wanted to come up with ideas on how to set up everything before I started changing things but my group members jumped right in. Even as we were getting ready to submit the link, I heard someone say "shouldn't we look at it just one more time?". Another group member reassured her that we can still make changes if needed. Nothing was set in stone.
I think that was one of the things that calmed me down a little when thinking about building my own site for a school library. It is not set in stone, I can continue to play around and take out or add things as I feel necessary. I just fear that I will try and make a completely new website each summer for the start of a new year.
I appreciate the opportunity to just explore. I learned about adding google forms to the site, something I never would have done before. I think I might make a sample site for myself and just use it to make "test" pages so that I can see all that can be done.
I do the exact thing you mention - create sample pages/sites of almost every tool that I use. That gives me a "playground" to try things out in. This is especially helpful in a school setting - because I can play, tweak, try things on a page that I am not concerned with how it looks :)
ReplyDelete