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.