I found a simple and promising solution for creating a quick web site for your class, a topic or as a simple resource depository:

Netvibes

Sign up is free and easy. You get to pick a URL for each page that you create (ex. http://www.netvibes.com/mrstolisano). Each individual pages can either be private or public. Individual pages can have their own tabs. This is pretty useful for different classes you teach or different periods.

The first Netvibes page I ever created was for my TechCamp this past week. I called the first tab on that page “General” and added a weather widget and a “To Do List” widget for every day. That kept the kids informed what we were planning on doing that day and kept me on track. Some campers were very diligent about having me cross off accomplished tasks every day too. Great way of reviewing what was done previously.

There are many different widgets to be added to your pages. You can choose a different layout for each tab, depending on how many widgets you want to add next to each other. Simply click on “edit” next to each tab’s title and choose the appropriate layout. I used the “Link” and the “HTML” module mostly on this TechCamo page. Just click the green “Add” button to move it into your tab. You then can move it around to the a specific position, if you choose a layout of more than “1”.

I used several tabs to classify different links to website, I wanted to make available for my campers to explore.

What I especially like about it, was its visual format, which is particular helpful for younger elementary school students who get frustrated when having to scroll through long lists of text links. By selecting to add a “Link Module”, then entering the URL, Netvibes  automatically added a thumbnail of the linked site. You can add a title and a description to the link module as well.

You can also combine different widget on tab.  Once you added the module, click edit and enter the URL (for the link) or paste an embed code from a different website (such as wallwisher , tinychat or glogster)

Campers worked on a Glog poster(s) during the week, which I was also able to embed the code from each camper. When they updated their glog through Glogster, it automatically updated on our netvibes site too.

Another helpful tab, proved to be the embeded Wallwisher code. A virtual Bulletin Board, where students could leave digital Stickies to answer or ask a question and share information about a topic.

I found netvibes to be a very easy tool to work with . It was intuitive, visual, customizable, “embeddable” and easily accessible for me and my students on any computer. Students went onto the page from home as well and made sure that I was going to leave the site up for them to go to even after our TechCamp had ended.

If you are looking for a simple way to create a site to organize a class, add information, pull information from different places together, add links, feeds and student created content, give Netvibes a try.

Here are some more widgets that are available to add to you pages.