Agriculture Websites

The students in our Geography class made websites that highlight important information about agriculture in Quebec.

The site the students used to construct their websites is www.weebly.com.  I like using Weebly because it is easy to use and at the same time, it has enough features to produce nice results.  Also, it is free.

Another good site which we used is www.scribblemaps.com.  Scribble Maps allows students to draw and color on Google Maps.  The resultant production can then be embedded in a website.  The students used Scribble Maps to identify the agricultural areas of Quebec and  the different physiographic regions of the province.

The students used www.chartgo.com to create embeddable charts.  I like Chartgo because it is simple to use and the results are aesthetically pleasing.

Here are a couple of examples of the websites produced by students:

Agriculture Quebec

Sabrina Agriculture

Explorers Websites

In our history class, the students created websites to display information about the European explorers.

We used www.weebly.com to create the sites.  We used www.scribblemaps.com to create the embedded maps and www.timerime.com to create the timelines.

Here are some examples:

http://europeanexploring123.weebly.com/

http://exploringeurope13.weebly.com/

Quebec’s Agriculture

Unit 2 of our Geography class focuses on agriculture in Quebec. I asked the students to create a website summarizing the main ideas.

The students used Weebly to create their sites. Weebly utilizes a drag-and-drop interface that makes web-authoring relatively easy.

We used Google Maps to embed a customized map showing the agricultural areas of Quebec. We used Chartle to create embedded charts.

Here is one student’s website:

Quebec's Agriculture - Agricultural Territory

Wikispaces

I wanted to create a website. For two reasons.

For one thing, I wanted to find a good website-building site that my students could use as a portal and a portfolio for their projects. Also, I wanted to create a site to organize the lessons and activities I find online; specifically, I wanted to organize them according to the topics prescribed by the Quebec Ministry of Education new Quebec Education Plan. Diigo is great for bookmarking, but it is not good for organizing bookmarks.

At first, I contemplated utilizing a mindmapping site. Mind42 was the best one, in MHO, because of its nice layout, and because it permits hyperlinking. However, I decided I wanted something more formal and more structured: a webpage.

There are a number of website-building sites. Some of them are listed on cooltoolsforschools. I perused a few of these sites, then narrowed my selection down to two: Weebly and Webnode. They are both decent sites that make it easy to create a website. Weebly has an interesting drag-and-drop interface. However, both sites seemed slightly more complicated than I liked, with constant button-clicking, and I experienced problems with the Weebly hyperlinks.

Then, through Twitter, I came across Wikispaces. I had heard of this site before, but I was hesitant to use it because a wiki suggests to me that other people can edit your website. However, it is possible to set the permissions to prohibit edits from everyone. For now, Wikispaces has the combination of simplicity and functionality that I was looking for. My (skeletal) website is here. The only unfortunate quality of Wikispaces is that there are obligatory advertisements.