Friday, July 18, 2014

Small, Tiny, Issues with Weebly

I continued my adventure with Weebly! I decided that for my Critical Information Literacy Project that I would create another website. I know what you’re thinking—overachiever. Well, that’s part of it, but I also wanted 1) more practice with Weebly and 2) wanted to make something that I could eventually use with my students. I think I’ve accomplished both.

So for my website, I decided that I would make one based on Edgar Allan Poe’s death theories. I am a little obsessed with Poe. Poe is my favorite unit to teach, I have a “Poe-ka Dot” tote bag, and I call Poe my boyfriend (although my students usually say that I can do better, which I’ll take as a compliment). I also have a one-eyed black cat named Poe, so not only am I obsessed with a dead alcoholic writer, but I’m also a cat lady. Anyway, I am pretty proud of my website so far! It was easy to make, and I think it looks awesome!  Click here if you'd like to see it!

I did have one issue, though. The formatting for text seems to be a bit of a pain sometimes. For example, I went to make a citation page, and there was no way (at least that I could find) to make a hanging indent. You may not think this is an absolutely horrible thing, but for an English teacher like me, it is. I wanted to make a citation page so that my students could use one as a model. Even though I use MLA in class and my citation page is APA, I figured my students would like to know that I actually took the time to make one. Does anyone know how to "fix" some of these formatting problems?

I also noticed that sometimes Weebly acted really slow. There were about three times where I had to refresh my page, and some of my work was gone. It could just be my grumpy old computer or the WiFi I was using, but it did get a wee bit frustrating. 

However, I think that making a Weebly as my teacher website and even for individual projects would work out great. I also think that students would love to make websites using Weebly because it is so easy. I think if students have about 30 minutes to fiddle around with Weebly, they should be good to go. It reminds me of Glogster in that even the most “uncreative” person can make an awesome looking website.


I hope to use Weebly more in the future, especially now that I know what I am doing!

4 comments:

  1. I had the same slow problem that you had when I was creating a website. It took forever to get something like a text box to come up. I agree with your comment that students would love to create their own website. It is fairly simple to use and students would be able to use it to create projects.

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  2. You are right that Weebly is occasionally slow, but it usually picks up again. As for your hanging indents, that is quite easy to do, but it requires a touch of HTML with CSS. That's right, Weebly can do anything by inserting an HTML block in it. I know that isn't the answer you wanted to hear, but it is one way to accomplish what you want. Try this out for example (just replace my square brackets with angle brackets; I had to type the square brackets because Blogspot wanted to interpret my HTML code:

    [p style="text-indent:-4em; margin-left:4em"]Marcovitz, David M. (2012). [i]Digital Connections in the Classroom[/i]. Washington, DC: International Society for Technology in Education.[/p]

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  3. So I managed to create the hanging indent, but I almost broke my computer in the process because it was so frustrating! I used the embed code function, and the first one worked. When it came time to add others, it was difficult to keep the cursor "focused" on where I wanted it. It also kept highlighting and clicking out of the box. I guess this is a part of Weebly's "slowness?"

    I found it easier to just copy and paste the HTML code into a Word document, and then I pasted my citations in the code function on Weebly. That was MUCH less frustrating.

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    Replies
    1. That's a good solution. Weebly's embed code area isn't good for typing large amounts of code. It is much better at copy and paste.

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